Memoirs of John R. Young, Utah Pioneer, 1847Young, John R.
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Memoirs of John R. Young, Utah Pioneer, 1847
Young, John R.
Latter Day Saint pioneers -- Utah -- Biography; Young, John R., 1837-
My last Sunday in England I spent with Elder Jacobs. We attended a
Methodist open-air meeting on May Hill. There were four local ministers
present. They mistook me for one of Spurgeon's elders from London, and
invited me to preach. With joy, I accepted the chair; but soon they
ordered me down; and when I refused to come down, they tried to pull me
down. I appealed to the people, who sustained me. The ministers left in
disgust. I talked for one hour on the restoration of the Gospel, then
called President Jacobs to the chair, and he bore a strong testimony to
the truth of what I had said.
It was thus that I closed my missionary labors in England.
When I came home, I brought Mother Jaynes, the old lady whom I first
saw in a dream, while sleeping in a wooden-bottomed chair. Just before
starting for home, I received a kind letter from my father-in-law,
William M. Black. Brother Black had forgotten my address, and so sent
the letter to the Liverpool office. By mistake it had been sent from
there into Scotland. It traveled thence all over Scotland and England,
and finally found me on the streets of London. The envelope was so
worn that a ten-dollar greenback bill was plainly visible, and was
kept in its place only by a tow string tied around the envelope. The
money, reaching me in that way seemed a miracle, and I resolved to do a
charitable deed with it.
At Michael, Dean Hill, in the Bristol conference, lived a family by
the name of Burris. The family consisted of father and mother, a son
Absalom, nineteen; Emma, seven; and Kissy, three years of age. The
father and son were not in the Church; but the home had been a home
for our elders for twenty years. When I was there, the elders had been
mobbed so much that open-air meetings had been discontinued.
President Joseph F. Smith wrote me to persist in holding them; but the
Saints refused to accompany me, so I went at it alone. Only little Emma
Burris went with me, and several times I felt that all that kept the
mob from doing violence to me, was the presence of that innocent little
girl clinging so trustingly to me, and I loved her for it. I wrote
to Mr. Burris, and asked him to let me bring Emma home with me. He
consented; and with that ten dollars I emigrated her to Salt Lake City.
Upon my arrival at father's, her uncles, Joseph and Thomas Morgan, came
to see her. They begged me to let her stav with them. I consented on
condition that they would bring the family to Zion. They promised to do
so, and they kept their covenant.
Upon reaching Zion, Emma's father and Brother Absalom joined the Church
and Brother Burris died a faithful worker in the Logan temple. At this
writing, 1916, Appie's son is filling a mission in the southern states.
What a rich harvest from so small a sowing! And the end of the fruitage
is not yet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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