“The Rock of Revelation,” chapter 8 of Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, Volume 3, Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955 (2022)
Chapter 8: “The Rock of Revelation”
Chapter 8
The Rock of Revelation
During the spring of 1904, John Widtsoe followed the Smoot hearings from afar. His friend and mentor Joseph Tanner, now serving as the superintendent of Church schools and a counselor in the Sunday School general presidency, was one of several Saints summoned to testify before the Senate committee. Since Joseph had married plural wives after the Manifesto, he refused to submit to the investigation and instead fled to Canada.
“I do not feel at all alarmed,” he wrote to John in late April, signing the letter with an alias. “When the Smoot case is decided, we shall have rest perhaps for a while.”1
Like other Saints, John believed the Smoot hearings were simply another trial of faith for the Church.2 He and Leah Widtsoe were back in Logan. Along with their daughter, Anna, they had a son, Marsel, and a baby on the way. Another son, John Jr., had died in February 1902, a few months before his first birthday.
The rest of the Widtsoe family was far away. John’s mother, Anna, and her sister Petroline Gaarden had left Utah to serve a mission in Norway, their homeland, in 1903. In a letter to Leah, John’s mother described their work. “We have met many old friends and talked with them about the gospel, many who never have had a conversation with a Latter-day Saint before,” she wrote. “We are trying to knock on the door of ‘tradition,’ but it is not easy work to get it open.”3
John’s younger brother, Osborne, meanwhile, had recently completed a mission in Tahiti and was now studying English literature at Harvard.4
Leah worked at home with the children and served on her stake Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association board. She also wrote monthly lessons on home economics for the Young Woman’s Journal. Each lesson was part of a yearlong course that young women in the Church could study and discuss in their YLMIA meetings. Leah approached each lesson scientifically, drawing on her university training to teach her readers about cooking, home furnishing, first aid, and basic medical care.5
John taught chemistry at the Agricultural College, ran the school’s experiment station, and studied ways to improve farming in Utah’s dry climate. His work took him to rural towns all around the state as he taught farmers how to use science to raise better crops. He also served as president of his ward Young Men’s MIA and as a member of the stake Sunday School board. Like Leah, he wrote regularly for the Church magazines.
John had sympathy for young Saints who struggled, as he once did, to reconcile gospel knowledge with secular learning. More and more people were embracing the idea that science and religion were at odds with each other. Yet John believed that science and religion were both sources of divine, eternal principles and could be reconciled.6
Recently, he had begun publishing a series of articles called “Joseph Smith as Scientist” in the Improvement Era, the official magazine of the YMMIA. Each article explained how the restored gospel anticipated some major discovery of modern science. In his article “Geological Time,” for instance, John explained how passages from the Book of Abraham accommodated scientific views that the earth was much older than the six thousand years some biblical scholars estimated. In another article, he identified parallels between aspects of the controversial theory of evolution and the doctrine of eternal progression.7
The series was a success. President Joseph F. Smith, who served as editor of the Improvement Era, sent a personal letter praising the series. His only regret was that he could not pay John for the work. “Like some of the rest of us,” he wrote, “you will, for the present at least, have to accept your pay in the knowledge that you have done good work for the benefit of the boys and girls of Zion.”8
“Our situation seems most serious now,” apostle Francis Lyman wrote in his journal. Joseph F. Smith’s testimony at the Reed Smoot hearing had done little to resolve the Senate committee’s concerns about the existence of post-Manifesto plural marriages in the Church. Nor did it help the Saints’ case that apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias Cowley, acting on the advice of Church leaders, made themselves scarce soon after the Senate committee summoned them to testify at the hearings. Like Joseph Tanner and other Church members, both men had married plural wives after the Manifesto. The two apostles had also performed many new plural marriages and encouraged Saints to keep the practice alive.9
As president of the Twelve, Francis had resolved that each man in the quorum should comply with the newly issued Second Manifesto. He had sent letters to several apostles, advising them of the First Presidency’s determination to implement the proclamation. “It is well that we shall understand this important matter alike and govern ourselves accordingly,” he wrote, “that there shall be no dissensions or disputations among us.”10
Later, President Smith assigned Francis to make sure that no more plural marriages took place in the Church. Since the late 1880s, some apostles had been authorized to perform sealings outside of temples for outlying areas. In September 1904, President Smith declared that all sealings must now take place in temples, thus making it impossible for Saints to enter into legitimate plural marriages in Mexico, Canada, or elsewhere. Francis promptly informed the apostles of this decision.11
In December, President Smith sent Francis to persuade John W. Taylor to testify at the Smoot hearings. Francis found John W. in Canada and encouraged him to follow the prophet’s counsel. At last, John W. agreed to testify and began preparing to travel to Washington.
That night, Francis went to bed, his mission a success. But at three o’clock in the morning he awoke trembling. The thought of John W. testifying at the hearings troubled him. John W. was deeply committed to plural marriage. If he revealed that he had performed post-Manifesto plural marriages, it would embarrass the Church and ruin Reed Smoot’s chances of serving in the Senate.
A quiet, peaceful feeling settled over Francis as he considered advising John W. against going to Washington. He asked the Lord to confirm that this was the correct course to take. A gentle sleep overtook him, and he dreamed that he saw President Wilford Woodruff. Surprised and full of emotion, he called out President Woodruff’s name and threw his arms around him. He then awoke, confident that his change of mind was right. He sought out John W. immediately and told him about the dream. John W. was ready to leave for Washington, but he was relieved when Francis counseled him not to go.12
Francis returned to Salt Lake City a short time later. Joseph F. Smith approved of his work in Canada, yet the question remained of what to do with the two apostles. President Smith knew he needed to demonstrate that the Church was firmly committed to ending plural marriage. To satisfy the Senate committee, he would have to formally distance John W. and Matthias from Church leadership, either by disciplining them or by asking them to resign. He relished neither option.13
Church leaders were split on how to handle the crisis. In October 1905, however, advisers to Reed Smoot warned them that time was running out for the Church to act. While testifying before the Senate committee earlier that year, Reed had promised that Church authorities would investigate the charges made against John W. and Matthias. Six months later, no investigation had taken place, and now some senators were questioning Reed’s honesty. To postpone an investigation any longer would signal to the world that Church leaders were acting in bad faith when they claimed to be actively opposing polygamy.14
The two apostles were summoned to Church headquarters, and over the next week, the Twelve met day after day to discuss what to do. At first, John W. and Matthias defended their actions, drawing a distinction between the Church’s formal withdrawal of support for plural marriage and their individual choice to continue entering into new marriages. Neither man fully sustained the Second Manifesto, however, a position now incompatible with good standing in the Church.
Ultimately, the quorum asked the two apostles to sign resignation letters. At first, John W. refused to resign. He accused his quorum of giving in to political pressure. Matthias responded more mildly, but he too was reluctant to comply. In the end, though, both men wanted what was best for the Church. They signed the papers, willing to sacrifice their place in the Twelve for the larger good.15
“It was a very painful and serious ordeal,” Francis wrote that day in his journal. “We were all very sorely distressed over it.” John W. and Matthias left the meeting with the goodwill and blessings of their brethren. But while the Twelve allowed them to retain their Church membership and apostleship, they were no longer members of the quorum.16
Two months later, on the morning of December 23, 1905, Susa Gates climbed into a carriage in Vermont, in the northeastern United States. The prophet Joseph Smith had been born exactly one hundred years earlier on a farm about three miles to the east, in the tiny village of Sharon. Now Susa and around fifty Saints were going to the farm to dedicate a monument to his memory.17
Leading the group was President Joseph F. Smith. With the Smoot hearings still in progress, he remained under the constant scrutiny of government officials and newspaper reporters. Earlier that year, the Salt Lake Tribune had published his testimony at the Smoot hearings alongside editorials casting doubt on his prophetic call and personal integrity.
“Joseph F. Smith has publicly denied that he receives revelations, or ever has received revelation, from God to guide the Mormon church,” read one editorial. “How far ought the Mormons to follow that kind of leader?”18 The editorials left some Saints confused and full of questions.
As Joseph Smith’s nephew, Joseph F. Smith had personal reasons for coming to Vermont. Yet the dedication would also give him another opportunity to speak publicly about the Church and testify of the divine work of the Restoration.19
Once Susa and the party were situated in their carriages, they set out for the dedication ceremony. The farm was at the top of a nearby hill, and the steep country roads were muddy with thawing snow. Local workers had hauled the one-hundred-ton monument along the same roads, piece by piece. At first, they had simply planned to pull the load with draft animals. But when a team of twenty strong horses could not budge the stone, workers spent nearly two grueling months dragging the monument up the hill with a horse-drawn system of ropes and pulleys.20
Nearing the farm, the party gasped as they rounded the final bend in the road. Ahead of them was a polished granite obelisk reaching 38½ feet into the sky—a foot for each year of Joseph Smith’s life. Beneath the obelisk was a large pedestal with an inscription bearing testimony of the prophet’s sacred mission. The words of James 1:5, the scripture that had inspired him to seek revelation from God, graced the top of the pedestal.21
Junius Wells, the monument’s designer, met the party at a cottage built on the foundation of the site where Joseph Smith was born. Upon entering the house, Susa admired the flat, gray hearthstone, which the builders had preserved from the original home. Most of the Saints who had known the prophet personally were now dead. But this hearthstone was an enduring witness of his life. She could imagine him playing beside it as a toddler.22
The service began at eleven o’clock. As he dedicated the memorial, President Smith gave thanks for the Restoration of the gospel and asked a blessing on the people of Vermont who supported the monument’s construction. He set the site apart as a place where people could come to meditate, learn more about Joseph Smith’s prophetic mission, and rejoice in the Restoration. He likened the foundation of the monument to the Church’s foundation of prophets and apostles, with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. He also compared its base to the rock of revelation on which the Church was built.23
In the days that followed, Susa, Joseph F. Smith, and other Saints took a short tour of Church sites in the eastern United States. Under President Smith’s direction, the Church had begun purchasing several sites sacred to its history, including the Carthage jail, where his father and uncle had been killed. Other Church historic sites in the eastern states remained out of the Church’s hands, although their owners generally gave the Saints permission to tour them.24
In Manchester, New York, the group walked reverently through the woods where Joseph Smith had seen his first vision of the Father and Son. During the prophet’s life, he and other Saints had occasionally testified publicly of his vision. But in the decades after Joseph’s death, Orson Pratt and fellow Church leaders had emphasized its central role in the Restoration of the gospel. An account of it now appeared as scripture in the Pearl of Great Price, and missionaries frequently referred to it in their discussions with people outside the Church.25
A profound sense of awe rested over Susa and her companions as they pondered the sacred event. “Here the boy kneeled in absolute faith,” Susa reflected. “Here, finally, earth’s fountains burst, and truth, the sum of existence, swept down on the beams of direct revelation.”26
Later, as they headed back to Utah, President Smith led a small testimony meeting aboard the train. “’Tis not I, nor any man, not even the prophet Joseph Smith, who stands at the head of this work, directing and leading it,” he told them. “It is God, through His Son, Jesus Christ.”
The message stirred Susa, and she was awed by the love of the Savior for God’s children. “Men are men, and therefore weak!” she noted. But Jesus Christ was Lord of all the world.27
While the Saints celebrated the dedication of the Joseph Smith memorial, Anna Widtsoe and Petroline Gaarden were still in Norway, preaching the gospel. More than two years had passed since the sisters left Utah. Their mission call had been unexpected, but not unwelcome. They had both been eager to return to their homeland to share their faith in the restored gospel with relatives and friends.28
Anthon Skanchy, one of the missionaries who taught Anna the gospel in the 1880s, was president of the Scandinavian Mission when the sisters arrived in July 1903. He assigned them to work in the area of Trondheim, Norway, where Anna had lived when she joined the Church. From there, the sisters took a boat to their home village, Titran, on a large island off Norway’s west coast. Anna was apprehensive when she arrived on the island. Twenty years earlier, people in Titran had turned their backs on her for joining the Church. Would they accept her and her religion now?29
Word quickly spread that the sisters had returned as Latter-day Saint missionaries. At first, no one—friend or family—would give them a place to stay. Anna and Petroline persisted, and eventually some people opened their doors.30
One day, the sisters visited their uncle Jonas Haavig and his family. Everyone seemed guarded, ready to debate the sisters about their beliefs. Anna and Petroline avoided the topic of religion, and the first night ended without conflict. But the next morning, after breakfast, their cousin Marie began asking the sisters difficult questions about the gospel, trying to provoke an argument.
“Marie,” Anna said, “I was determined not to speak to you about religion, but now you’ll listen to what I have to say.” She bore a forceful testimony, and Marie listened in silence. But Anna could tell that her words had no effect. She and Petroline left the house later that day, heartbroken over what had happened.31
The sisters soon returned to Trondheim, but they went back to Titran several times over the next two years. The people grew more welcoming as time went on, and Anna and Petroline were eventually invited into every home in town. Their service in other parts of Norway was also challenging, but the sisters were grateful they had experience in Church service before they left for their mission.
They were also grateful that they spoke Norwegian before they arrived. “We take our part more on all occasions than the young missionaries who can’t speak the language, neither when they come nor when they go home,” Anna informed John in a letter.32
As happy as missionary work made Anna, she missed her family in Utah. John, Osborne, and Leah wrote regularly. In the summer of 1905, John reported that he lost his job at the Agricultural College when the school administration ousted him and two other faithful Church members from the faculty. Brigham Young University, the new name for Brigham Young Academy in Provo, immediately hired him to run its chemistry department. Since its founding in 1875, the school had grown into the Church’s preeminent institution of higher learning, and John gratefully accepted the job.
Osborne, meanwhile, graduated from Harvard and accepted a position as head of the English department at Latter-day Saints’ University in Salt Lake City.33
“God has been good with us,” Anna told John in a letter. “I believe we have been able with the Lord’s help to do something good. We have seen much fruit of our labor here, and I hope and pray to God that we may also be assisted by Him in the new year as in the year past.”34
In January 1906, mission leaders assigned Anna and Petroline to remain in Trondheim to finish their mission among family members and do genealogical research. Their relatives were still not interested in the gospel. But the sisters no longer sensed hostility and suspicion from them. They took comfort in this change. They had done their part to serve the Lord in Norway.35
That summer, European Saints learned that President Joseph F. Smith was taking a brief tour of their continent. The news thrilled eleven-year-old Jan Roothoff, especially when he heard that the prophet’s first appearance would be in the Netherlands, where Jan lived. The boy was too excited to talk about anything else.
Several years earlier, Jan had caught a disease that infected his eyes and made him sensitive to light. His mother, Hendriksje, a single parent, kept him out of school and tried to make him as comfortable as possible by hanging curtains so he could play in the dark. But he eventually went blind, and doctors told his mother that he would never regain his sight.
Jan now wore bandages over his eyes to protect them from the light. But he knew that if anyone could heal his eyes, it was a prophet of God. “Mother, he is the most powerful missionary,” he said. “All he has to do is look into my eyes and I will be well.”36
Jan’s mother believed that the Lord could heal him, but she was reluctant to encourage him to seek President Smith’s help. “The president is very busy just now,” she replied. “There are hundreds of people who want to see him. You are only a boy, my son, and we must not intrude.”37
On August 9, 1906, Jan and his mother attended a special meeting in Rotterdam, where President Smith spoke to about four hundred Saints. As Jan listened to him speak, he tried hard to picture the prophet. Before losing his eyesight, Jan had seen a photograph of President Smith, and he remembered his kind face. Now he could hear kindness in the prophet’s voice as well, even though he had to wait for a missionary to translate the words into Dutch before he understood them.38
President Smith spoke about the power of missionaries. “It is their business to come to you and to show you the greater light,” he said, “that your eyes may be opened, that your ears may be unstopped, that your hearts may be touched with a love for the truth.”39
Jan’s faith did not waver. After the meeting, his mother led him to a doorway where President Smith and his wife Edna were greeting the Saints. “This is the president, little Jan,” Hendriksje said. “He wants to shake hands with you.”
Taking him by the hand, President Smith lifted away Jan’s bandages. He then touched the boy’s head and peered into his inflamed eyes. “The Lord bless you, my boy,” he said. “He will grant you the desires of your heart.”
Jan did not understand President Smith’s English, but his eyes had already begun to feel better. When he arrived home, he could not suppress his joy. He tore off his bandages and looked toward the light. “See, Mother,” he said. “They are healed. I can see well!”
His mother hurried to him and tested his vision in every way she could imagine. Jan could indeed see just as well as he could before the disease.
“Mama,” said Jan, “the president’s name is Joseph F. Smith, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” his mother said. “He is a nephew of the prophet Joseph.”
“I shall pray for him always,” Jan said. “I know he is a true prophet.”40
After leaving Rotterdam, Joseph F. Smith and his party traveled east to Germany, where around three thousand Saints lived. The Swiss-German Mission was the fastest-growing mission in the Church. Yet Germany’s religious freedom laws did not recognize the Church or protect it from persecution, which was on the rise after scandalous reports of the Smoot hearings reached Europe. Some German ministers, stung by the loss of members from their congregations, worked with the press to turn public opinion against the Saints. The police drove missionaries out of towns and kept Church members from meeting together, administering the sacrament, or using the Book of Mormon or other latter-day scriptures.41
After stopping in Berlin to meet with local Church members, missionaries, and a small group of American Latter-day Saints studying music in the city, President Smith and his party traveled south to Switzerland. At a conference in Bern, the prophet counseled the Saints to submit to their local governments and respect the religious beliefs of others. “We do not wish to force our ideas on the people but to explain the truth as we understand it,” he said. “We leave it to the individual to accept it or not.” He taught that the message of the restored gospel was peace and freedom.
“One of its most glorious effects on people,” he said, “is that it frees them from the bands of their own sins, cleanses them from sin, brings them into harmony with heaven, makes them into brothers and sisters under the covenant of the gospel, and teaches them to love their fellow human beings.”42
President Smith closed his sermon with a prophecy of future days: “The time will yet come—maybe not in my days or even in the next generation—when temples of God that are dedicated to the holy ordinances of the gospel will be established in diverse countries of the earth.”
“For this gospel must be spread across the whole world,” he declared, “until the knowledge of God covers the earth like the waters cover the great deep.”43