I have listened with peculiar interest to the remarks made by our missionaries. Their remarks are truly cheering, and are a faithful index to the feelings and spirit which have influenced them during their absence from us.
I was more particularly struck with the remarks of some who said that they hardly knew what doctrines to preach when they first arrived at the fields of their labor, and others hardly knew that baptism was necessary for the remission of sins. These young men were untaught, untutored, yet the spirit of the Gospel dwelt in them; it was born in them, and they have been reared under its influence to a greater or less degree, yet apparently they knew it not. How unlike the missionaries of other churches is this? They must be educated classically and theologically, and then they go forth to preach to a credulous world systematically a mass of inconsistent and contradictory doctrines—which they call the Gospel.
These missionaries of ours felt very much as I did on one occasion when I first landed in Germany. I was dropped from the coach on the side walk; I could not tell them where I wanted to stop, for I did not know myself, and, thought I, I may as well stop in one place as another. I could not tell anybody what I wanted for I did not know what I wanted. I did not remain in that situation long until I found a way to get to an hotel, where I was soon forced, by the pressure of circumstances around me and the cravings of my appetite, to make known my wants, designs and purposes in the language of the people among whom I was cast. In like manner our young men go out to preach the Gospel; and although they have lived under the influence of the Spirit of the Gospel all their days, yet they find themselves unable at first to delineate only the principles and laws of salvation; but the spirit that is in them soon bursts asunder the fetters that seem to bind them, and they launch forth into a field of intelligence hitherto unexplored by them, and are enabled, in a short time, not only to be filled with a flood of light and truth, but to attain unto a power of utterance that astonishes themselves and their friends. God is in all this; He laid the foundation of this Church and he dwells in the hearts of his servants, and He, by the power of his spirit, originates and gives power to utter the thoughts He wishes to communicate to mankind through His servants. When we trust in Him every obstacle is removed from our path.
When listening to these young brethren, my heart has burned within me with gratitude and joy; I was reminded forcibly of the days of my youth, when I went forth with others to proclaim the same Gospel and was brought into many narrow and tight places. The Lord will always open our way if we are faithful, and allow us a field of operation that will be adequate to all our wants, conditions and circumstances.
Those missionaries who go abroad to labor for the building up of Zion leave their families behind them, and they were particularly charged not to beg of the poor on their missions means to send home to feed their families, and that whatever they might gain by the voluntary contributions of the people among whom they might labor, over and above that which would be necessary for their immediate wants, should be dedicated to the immigration of the poor—to bring home the sheaves they had been enabled to reap. Their families are here, and have not harvested in abundance of the temporal comforts of the earth, but they have managed to live along from hand to mouth. There were contributions and subscriptions made last year to aid the families of our absent missionaries, but how many of them have been faithfully and frankly paid in and how many remain yet unpaid, I am not prepared to say, but, it has been suggested to me that there are still many delinquents who did really feel liberal, but have not since found a convenient time to honor that liberal feeling by paying in what they have subscribed.