Tudor Arghezi 7-9, Sector 1
Bucharest, Romania
August 21, 1994
David Snell
6, Portland Gardens
Falmouth, Cornwall TR 11 2QT
ENGLAND
Dear David:
I hope you'll forgive me being so late writing back to acknowledge your note telling us of your mother's passing. I sent a copy of your letter to my son Mark -- to whom you may remember giving your golliwog toy when you met as small children. I hope Mark got in touch. Thereafter I mislaid your letter and only now have run across it with your address.
Both Lola and I were very sorry to hear of your mother's death. She was a fine woman -- always the gracious hostess during our rare visits to her and your father. Please let him know how much we appreciated knowing her. I hope yet to see him (and you) again.
You say in your letter that towards the end her arthritis kept her in pain. My own mother also suffered much from this disability in her later years, and towards the end we came to realize that death would come as a release and a blessing.
I realize this may not be the time to touch on religion, but I know your parents were both church-goers -- I remember waiting at your house an hour during one visit, waiting for them to return from Service. It must surely be a comfort to know that you will see her again on the Other Side. Indeed, as I once briefly tried to explain to your father [or perhaps it was your mother's cousin Bobby Dunstan who was visiting from the Army], in the religion of our side of the family, it is taught that parents and children, grandparents, great grandparents -- and so on back as far as the chain of righteous living may be found -- all may be sealed together, living or dead, by special priesthood ordinance to live together in an eternal family unit in the Hereafter.
This was the purpose of temples in ancient times, and this knowledge and priesthood authority were restored in this era of the Fulness of Times. Today there are some fifty Temples of the Lord scattered among the countries of the world (including one near London and another under construction near Preston). During his life on Earth, Jesus prophesied that His gospel as he had given it to the disciples would be transformed and corrupted beyond recognition or acceptance by Him (see parable of the sower Matt. 13:24-30). Paul, in his second epistle to the Thessalonians (II Thess. 2:3) also warned of this saying, "Let no man deceive you by any means; for that day [the day of Christ's return] shall not come, except there come a falling away first." The author of the Acts of the Apostles softened this hard knowledge by promising that while Christ must remain in the heavens until after this Great Apostacy had occurred, there would indeed come "a times of the restitution of all things, which God has spoken by the mouths of all his holy prophets since the world began" (Acts 3:30).
It was the knowledge that the fullness of the gospel had indeed once again been restored to the earth which brought your Great Great Uncle, my grandfather William James Timmins to America where he married my grandmother in one such temple for Time and for All Eternity. It is doubly comforting for us as a family to know that by living decently we will not only enjoy the resurrection promised to other good Christians such as your mother, but be able to continue to enjoy life together as families. I certainly do not wish to push my beliefs on you or your wife -- or indeed your father; but the thought occurs to me that with the immediate grief of your mother's passing over, you might wish to explore the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which, with all the solemnity of my heart I assure you is indeed the Restoration of the original teachings of the Savior, containing the fullness of the gospel as originally given to the Apostles, but which disappeared from earth during the Dark Ages as a result of the corruption of its teachings by those seeking the honor and approval of men, replacing its simple teachings with tares -- i.e. with neo-Platonic philosophy and the pomp, rites, and organizational trimmings of the Roman Empire. Good men during the Reformation gave their lives to break the grip of superstitious control over the minds of men and remove the grossest distortions of form and substance, resulting in the Reformed Churches, but in doing so they openly acknowledged that they had no authority to restore priesthood authority. Nor could anything be known of ancient temple rites without new revelation.
In 1830 this knowledge and authority was restored to two young men in the newly independent United States of America -- the first country on earth since ancient times in which freedom of religion was guaranteed by written Constitution -- when Peter, James, and John, those Christ had placed at the head of the apostolate of old, came to the earth to lay their hands on the heads of twenty-five year old Joseph Smith and his young schoolteacher companion Oliver Cowdery, ordaining them to the modern apostleship. Restored earlier, such new apostles would have been burned at the stake or exiled for preaching other than the approved, established religion.
While I am proud of the great work done by the founders and martyrs of the Church of England -- and my generations of ancestors who worshipped therein, I am even more proud of my grandparents and great grandparents who left the security and comfort of their homes in Cornwall, Lancashire, Scotland, France, and Denmark to cross the Great American Plains by handcart and ox-cart to build a new empire on the American frontier. Among these was my Great Grandfather Robert Thornley from Ulnes Walton, Lancs., who with his cousin Seth Langton were in 1855 the first two settlers of northern Cache Valley, Utah (near the Idaho border). And another William Stuart Brighton of Airdrie, Scotland, who pushed a handcart all the way across the plains, carrying everything his family possessed to help built the new church in the Rocky Mountains of the American West. A half generation later, my Grandfather William James Timmins who, coming from Penryn, Cornwall, became the first engineer at the new Cache Valley sugar refinery as industry and better times came to improve the lives of the earlier Pioneers.
My home state of Utah was kept out of the American union for 50 years until the Church gave up the practice of plural marriage (a hard and strange doctrine the Lord apparently considered necessary as he had among the pioneering people of early Israel to bring enough Latter-day Saint children into the world that his people could hold their own in a world replete with apostate religions). Finally, after having had pieces carved out of its territory to form all or parts of eight non-Mormon American states around it (all of Nevada, part of Oregon, nearly all of Idaho, the western halfs of Wyoming and Colorado, the north west corner of New Mexico, the northern half of Arizona, and the corridor of California leading to San Diego [founded by Mormons]), Utah was admitted as a state in 1896. We'll be celebrating our Centennial of Statehood in 1996 -- and Sesquicentennial of the arrival of the Pioneers in 1997. But the Latter-day Saint (LDS, or Mormon) Church with nearly 10 million members, is today the fastest growing church in the world with more missionaries preaching the Restored Gospel than the entire Catholic Church: indeed, almost as many as all other Christian churches combined.
Not to overwhelm you, but because I don't know how otherwise to put you in touch with the LDS Church (though you might try looking in your telephone directory under Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the chance that there is a congregation in Falmouth), I am enclosing two or three papers I'm in the process of editing for publication in a book of my collected writings now that I'm retired.
The first is a review of a book written by Sir Richard Burton the noted British explorer who visited Salt Lake City almost 145 years ago. His book City of the Saints has just been republished by the University of Colorado Press. You may find the review of interest. I'm quite sure your father will. The second is about temples and their purpose. Since the Mormon Church is the only organization in the world which I know of (other than the Free Masons) which builds temples today, you may also find this of interest. The third contains some reflections on two Christian "heresies" of historic importance. Both Arius and Pelagius were closer to the truth as Christ taught it than the versions of Greek philosophy which the schoolmen introduced to replace what they felt were the less polished concepts of God put forward by the Galilean fishermen. The final paper is a comparison of Church teachings as recorded in about 200 A.D. by Eusebius -- an early Christian bishop, and the teachings of the Restored Church of today. The parallels are striking. And the differences between what Eusebius records about the teachings, organization, and practices of the early Christian Church and those of the major Christian churches of the post-Dark Ages, post-Reformation world are equally striking. I include the latter document because, though long and raising many points you may well find puzzling, does succeed (I think) in drawing startling doctrinal and organizational parallels I would hope you may wish to explore -- ideally with the assistance of a couple of LDS missionaries living near you.
Both Lola and I do wish you and your wife well, and sincerely pray that your father is adjusting to life alone. I lost my first wife and lived quite miserably until I met and married Lola sometime afterwards, so I understand something of what he is going through.
With all best wishes, your cousin,
David Timmins
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