His Faith Was In Truth As He Saw It - Defender Of The Faith

See original here with footnotes

Setting: England, 1862

A sleepy child stands, dreams still in his eyes, his mother’s hands resting on his small shoulders. “I have to leave you and Mary here…” her voice quivers, “There is a place I have to go, and one day you will meet me there.” The boy barely understands what is happening. The night’s fog still clouds his fledgling mind. She puts her arms around her five year-old son. “Promise me,” she tells the child, “when you grow up to be a man, you will meet me in Zion.” A tired boy responds with all the solemnity a five year-old can summon, “I will.” He will not see his mother for a long time. She had left to join the Mormons across the ocean in the American west. His older sister would be put to work at a kiln, given to another family for her care. They too would not see each other for a while. For years, this child would sleep on a cold floor without a blanket. Dragged along to the taverns by his foster caregivers, the Toveys, he would crouch under the tables to avoid the chaos of an intoxicated crowd, then left to wander the dark streets back to his bed of stone and dirt. He worked in the stone sawyer trade, returning home to a meal of scraps before falling asleep still hungry. Mr. Tovey, a preacher for the Mormon church (saving all the week’s practice of his faith for Sunday) forced the boy to stand on a chair and sing for the gathered congregation – before the meetings were scattered by the faith’s detractors. The child would carry the chair home. He would go homeless for months, running away to avoid being sold by his caregivers into the British Army for one shilling, and for other reasons. For brief periods, Mrs. Tovey would read to the child stories of a boy much like him who talked with God - stories of gold plates, angels, miracles, and murder. The child listened with a mind wide open, imagination running free. He turned nine-years old.

It was a cold winter’s Sunday. The snow fell lightly that day, adding a fresh layer to the frozen ground. A crowd left the site of the day’s sermon. The child picked up his singing chair, preparing for the walk back to his destitute residence. The Mormon missionaries that attended the meeting walked to him, one taking a knee. “Young man,” one said, “the prophet Brigham Young has instructed us to bring you and your sister to America.” The child could hardly wait. He was going to Zion – a far off home. He and his sister left on April 31, 1866.

The money sent by their mother had been lost, and their ill-suited clothes for a chilled journey reflected it. They shared Mary’s coat, passing it back and forth. The boy lost his shoes in a river. His feet turned black and hard with blisters. Blood dripped out of the cracks in his hardened skin. Mary would pick the cactus spines from his feet until they found shoes on a dead man he could wear. The family was reunited in Zion on September, 1866. “I felt I finally arrived, that I belonged to somebody, that somebody had an interest in me.” 

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Many people would have interest in this boy as he grew older, and even more after his death. He is remembered today as Mormonism’s premiere theologian, intellectual, and defender. His name was Brigham Henry Roberts, B.H. for short. By age eleven, the boy learned the alphabet and began to read between his jobs as a bricklayer, farm hand, and ox team driver on the new railroad in Salt Lake City.

He then went to work in the mines. There he learned to swear, gamble, drink, and to fit in with that sort of crowd – a trait which would help him later in his life. The boy turned seventeen. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith, working long hours. He was used to this already. He persuaded his master to allow him to attend the local school. He was granted three winter months to go. Before he turned twenty, he became the local library’s president, began a hobby of public speaking, debate, and writing – though he could not spell worth salt, a “source of much humiliation.” His reading skills deepened with practice, and he absorbed mature and complex works on economics, history, and religion. His blacksmith apprenticeship finished, he became a dairy farm worker. His community, realizing the potential of this young man in their midst, arranged for him to attend the University of Deseret where the rich and the promising were schooled (this was the equivalent of a high school education now). He was grateful for their support. He walked eleven miles to attend, catching a ride on a hay wagon back home to avoid walking twenty-two. He graduated in half the time than the rest of his cohort, rising to the top of his class. He gave the graduation speech in the clothes of poverty, against the backdrop of his well-dressed classmates. For this he was embarrassed, everyone knew he was different – that he was poor. But heaven touched him – he was created to stand apart, to do a job that only different souls can do. 

The young man married a girl by the name of Louisa, taught at the schoolhouse, and was called on a mission to Tennessee at the age of twenty-three. He would sleep in bushes, in schoolhouses, and businesses that would allow him to. While living the destitute preacher’s life, not being out in the field for more than two months, he was already publicly debating a popular preacher who claimed that Christ’s gospel and Abraham’s gospel were not the same. The young man studied, argued, and won the day. Sixty converts were baptized into the young man’s faith. One of them said the preacher “had left Abraham in hell, and you dared to get him out.” The young man returned home to shear sheep and teach again, until he was asked at age twenty-seven to be the president of the mission activities in the Southern United States mission. He agreed, and would play pranks on his missionaries, dressing up in homeless garb and heckle them as they rode the train to the mission home, revealing himself after he made them look like fools with his probing questions on religious topics. When missionaries were murdered by members of the Klu Klux Klan near Nashville Tennessee, he and a few others went undercover to retrieve the bodies, navigating the dark roads guarded by armed men, knowing what he looked like and were waiting for him. He was not recognized despite walking in their midst. The bodies were retrieved, exfiltrated from hostile territory, transported to a train, secured in special coffins, and shipped to Utah. The man would arrange with his secretary, J. Golden Kimball to exfiltrate other Mormons to safer territory. He by chance ran into a photographer while he was dressed in the clothes used to infiltrate the hostile territory, and took a picture. The photographer published the photo without his permission, and it made its way back to Utah. The stories of his orchestrated operation and personal implementation won him the admiration of the Mormon people back in Utah.

He returned home for a break from the unusual chaos, and felt inspired to follow the practice of polygamy. He and his wife selected a candidate named Celia, who readily accepted. They were married before he left to resume his duties in the mission field. They did not consummate their marriage before he left. The federal government sent agents to apprehend him, as polygamy was a federal crime. He was conveniently reassigned to England for his political safety. There he frequented the famous Liverpool Picton library, taking snippets from the diverse range of books and adding them to his archive of notes. He became editor of the Church’s England newspaper, The Millennial Star, and again engaged in the public square to debate on behalf of the Church. 

On finishing his assignment, he felt it best to return home, where he was immediately sustained into the first council of the seventy, became the editor of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association’s magazine The Contributor, and surrendered himself to the court of justice for the federal crime of polygamy. His experience as a youth working in the mines gave him the ability to fit in with the other inmates, who grew to trust in him. They told them about their lives, confided in him their trust. He took personal risks to smuggle their letters out. He was their guardian, their companion. When he was released, he went back to reading and writing. 

His book collection grew extensive. His scholarship was a raw talent, unmolded by formal education. He was a blue-collared self taught intellectual. While some of his colleagues in the councils of the Church held doctorate degrees, he had the equivalent of a high school education.  Nevertheless, despite his academic handicap, the leaders went to him for answers. Even today, he is recognized, by those not of our faith, as the premier theologian our faith tradition has produced. 

He was not satisfied with mere studies alone. At the age of sixty-one, he traveled to Kentucky, passed the U.S. Army’s physically demanding officer’s  selection course to become a chaplain in the 145th Light Field Artillery unit during World War I, a unit that still exists today in Utah’s Army National Guard.

Though he was the one called upon to defend the Church, he was more nuanced than a mere puppet of the institution. He on multiple occasions clashed with his colleagues in the Church, “...in passionate independence…” (Truman Madsen). Enraged at the firing of BYU professors who taught the theory of evolution in their classes, arguing that it was compatible with scripture, he clashed with then Elder Joseph F. Smith. Battle lines were drawn in the quorum, with those who had attended college ( who allied namely with Elder James E. Talmage (Dr.) and Elder John A. Widtsoe (Dr.)) going head to head at the pulpit in General Conference against Joseph Fielding Smith over the subject of evolution, science, young earth creationism, and religion. The battle they started continued throughout the 20th century. Through his coalition of apostles' passionate defense of the position, he staved off Joseph Fielding Smith from convincing the prophet from declaring an anti-scientific stance, a trend that other denominations were taking. He instead declared the Church's neutrality on the subject. Among the books of his  legacy includes the most honest historical record a member of the Church has produced, which shamelessly includes historical facts the Church would later attempt to shroud in the lost annals of history. He wrote extensively for newspapers including the national magazine Americana, and authored numerous books on theology, Christian history, and defenses of the Church. His relentless pursuit of truth as it presented itself, whether by scripture or science, earned him both respect and annoyance from his fellow brothers in the priesthood. His legacy, one of honest searching, steadfast discipleship, and unrelenting faith in the face of men who had killed and who intended to kill again. He lived on the front lines of his faith, unafraid to defend what he believed, no matter who it was against - polemic or prophet, brethren or preacher, his faith was in truth as he saw it. We have never had one like him in the leadership of the Church since. 

A sample of the writings of BH Roberts

“Disciples and partisans, in the world of religious and of philosophical opinion, are of two sorts. There are, first, the disciples pure and simple, — people who fall under the spell of a person or of a doctrine, and whose whole intellectual life thenceforth consists in their partisanship. They expound, and defend, and ward off foes, and live and die faithful to the one formula. Such disciples may be indispensable at first in helping a new teaching to get a popular hearing, but in the long run they rather hinder than help the wholesome growth of the very ideas that they defend : for great ideas live by growing, and a doctrine that has merely to be preached, over and over, in the same terms, cannot possibly be the whole truth. No man ought to be merely a faithful disciple of any other man. Yes, no man ought to be a mere disciple even of himself. We live spiritually by outliving our formulas , and by thus enriching our sense of their deeper meaning. Now the disciples of the first sort do not live in this larger and more spiritual sense. They repeat. And true life is never mere repetition.

I believe “Mormonism” affords opportunity for disciples of the second sort; nay, that its crying need is for such disciples. It calls for thoughtful disciples who will not be content with merely repeating some of its truths, but will develop its truths; and enlarge it by that development. Not half — not one-hundredth part — not a thousandth part of that which Joseph Smith revealed to the Church has yet been unfolded, either to the Church or to the world. The work of the expounder has scarcely begun. The Prophet planted by teaching the germ-truths of the great dispensation of the fulness of times. The watering and the weeding is going on, and God is giving the increase, and will give it more abundantly in the future as more intelligent discipleship shall obtain. The disciples of ”Mormonism,” growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; co-operating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression, and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development.”

“Mental laziness is the vice of men, especially with reference to divine things. Men seem to think that because inspiration and revelation are factors in connection with the things of God, therefore the pain and stress of mental effort are not required; that by some means these elements act somewhat as Elijah's ravens and feed us without effort on our part. To escape this effort, this mental stress to know the things that are, men raise all too readily the ancient bar— "Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther." Man cannot hope to understand the things of God, they plead, or penetrate those things which he has left shrouded in mystery. "Be thou content with the simple faith that accepts without question. To believe, and accept the ordinances, and then live the moral law will doubtless bring men unto salvation; why then should man strive and trouble himself to understand? Much study is still a weariness of the flesh." So men reason; and just now it is much in fashion to laud "the simple faith;" which is content to believe without understanding, or even without much effort to understand. And doubtless many good people regard this course as indicative of reverence-this plea in bar of effort-"thus far and no farther." "There is often a great deal of intellectual sin concealed under this old aphorism," remarks Henry Drummond. "When men do not really wish to go farther they find it an honorable convenience sometimes to sit down on the outmost edge of the 'holy ground' on the pretext of taking off their shoes." "Yet," he continues, "we must be certain that, making a virtue of reverence, we are not merely excusing ignorance; or under the plea of 'mystery' evading a truth which has been stated in the New Testament a hundred times, in the most literal form, and with all but monotonous repetition." (Natural Law in the Spiritual World, pp. 89, 90.)

This sort of "reverence" is easily simulated, and is of such flattering unction, and so pleasant to follow — "soul take thine ease" — that without question it is very often simulated; and falls into the same category as the simulated humility couched in 'I don't know," which so often really means "I don't care, and do not intend to trouble myself to find out.”