The Work and the Glory (189 page)

Book Four: The Work and the Glory - Thy Gold to Refine

The Work and the Glory - Thy Gold to Refine

Text illustrations by Robert T. Barrett

© 1993 Gerald N. Lund and Kenneth Ingalls Moe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P. O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company.

Bookcraft is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

First printing in hardbound 1993 First printing in paperbound 2001 First printing in trade paperbound 2006

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-73463

ISBN 0-88494-893-5 (hardbound)

ISBN 1-57345-873-2 (paperbound) ISBN-13

978-1-59038-652-1 (trade paperbound)

Printed in the United States of America

Banta, Menasha, WI

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2 

Preface

In the prefaces to the previous three volumes, I have concluded by expressing my appreciation for all of those who have made important contributions to this series. It is not necessary to repeat all of those expressions again, so I say only this: Without Kim and Jane Moe and their vision, without the competent and efficient staff at Bookcraft, without the researchers and secretaries and trusted manuscript readers and artists,
The Work and the Glory
would not be a reality today. And my wife, Lynn—the only one besides myself who knows what writing this series has required because she has paid much of the price—not only puts up with my long hours at the computer but also completely and totally believes in this project. How can one ever give adequate thanks for that?

In prefacing this volume, I should like to add only two additional expressions of thanks. To the numerous readers who have been following the saga of the Benjamin Steed family and who have come to think of the Steeds as I do—as real and living people whom we care about a great deal—thank you for your unflagging support. It has been a most gratifying project for me to work on, but it is especially gratifying to know that others are enjoying it as well.

Second, I express a deep and reverential gratitude to those early Saints who provided the raw material from which this novel gets its life. Not only have they inspired me, but they have kindled in me a renewed determination to put away the petty and temporal things that so often clutter our lives and to willingly submit myself to whatever the Lord sees is necessary in the refining and forging of the gold I hope he has in mind for me someday.

One other comment of a more practical nature: As I wrote volume 4, I decided to do the endnotes as I completed each chapter, rather than wait and do them all at once as I had done in previous volumes. For convenience, on the manuscript I added them to the end of each chapter. To my surprise, those who read the manuscript found this to be a welcome change. They said they really liked knowing immediately which portions of the chapters were based on historical events. So in this volume the chapter notes are found at the end of each chapter.

With the coming forth of
Thy Gold to Refine
, volume 4 in the series
The Work and the Glory
, the saga of the Steed family and their intimate involvement with the events of the Restoration continues.

Volume 1 (1827 to 1830) introduced the Steeds, who had moved into upstate New York in 1826. There, in the spring of 1827, they met Joseph Smith, the young man the Lord had called to open the work of the last dispensation. Through Benjamin’s doubting eyes and Nathan’s and Mary Ann’s believing eyes, we witnessed the opening scenes of God’s great work of the latter days.

In volume 2 (1830 to 1836), the development of the infant Church began, and we saw how that development profoundly impacted the Steed family members as the Church swelled rapidly in numbers and moved from New York to Ohio and Missouri.

Volume 3 (1836 to 1838) saw the first major internal challenge to the Church as many of the recent converts—including several important leaders—became disillusioned and disaffected with the exacting standards the Lord requires of his people, and left the Church. Not only did they apostatize, but in many cases they became bitter enemies and fought with untiring ferocity against Joseph Smith and their former associates. Driven from Kirtland, the Church and the Steeds ended up in northern Missouri. Old wounds that had left rifts in the Steed family fabric began to heal, and through marriage and childbirth the Steed clan more than doubled in numbers.

Surprisingly, volume 4 covers the smallest period of time of any of the volumes so far—from July 1838 to March 1839, a period of less than nine months. I say “surprisingly” because as I began work on
Thy Gold to Refine,
I was determined to pass over swiftly the first few months that the novel would cover. Why? Because this period of Church history is one of the grimmest in the whole story of the Restoration. It is a time of continuous adversity, grinding opposition, intense tribulation, and frightening violence. Gallatin, Crooked River, Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman, DeWitt, Haun’s Mill—the very geography reeks with blood and horror and sorrow. I feared that the story was so depressing and so dark that readers would find it a burden to wade through it in any detail. So my original plan was to treat those few months swiftly. We would get the Steeds out of Missouri and into Nauvoo as quickly as possible and go on to more pleasant times.

But stories have lives of their own sometimes, and to my own surprise—and wonder!—this turned out to be the case with volume 4. The story is too rich, the events are too momentous, the tragedies too moving, the pathos and the poignancy too wonderful and too terrible and too inspiring to simply brush over lightly. These Saints were real people, and their story is one of incredible loyalty and faith in the face of staggering adversity.

Why was the price so high for these early Church members? Why was the call to conversion so fraught with challenges? If the Saints were God’s people, as they believed they were, why did he allow their enemies to run amok among them? Why didn’t God intervene in their behalf? These are questions of pressing relevance for our generation as well. Sometimes we, as modern Latter-day Saints, wonder why adversity and trials and setbacks and tragedies become our lot. “Why is this happening to me?” we cry. “What am I doing wrong? Why isn’t the Lord answering my cries for help?”

As I delved into the details of those threshing days in Missouri, I began to find answers to those questions not only in the scriptures and the revelations but in the fleshy chapters of individual hearts. Such chapters were written by people who, without question, considered themselves in no way unusual or remarkable, other than in their faith and their calling to serve God. And grim though those chapters may sometimes be, they nevertheless teach powerful lessons about choices and chastisement, about challenges and change, about cherishing and charity, about tribulation and triumph. They are lessons of pressing relevance for today’s stress-filled, harried world. They can stiffen the will and lift the heart and bring consolation in answer to our ardent cryings.

Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord said, “Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10). A few chapters later in the same book, similar imagery is used: “Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work” (Isaiah 54:16).

The furnace and the forge. In those two images there are great lessons to be learned.

First, the fire itself is a refining, purging, cleansing agent. The impurities are consumed, the dross burned away until only the purest of the metal remains. Speaking of Christ’s second coming, Malachi asked: “But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire . . . : and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver” (Malachi 3:2–3).

There is a work to be done in preparation for the second coming of Christ, and the Lord needs a people who are not only willing but also strong enough (and pure enough!) to do what must be done. And for all their wonderful and wondrous determination to be good and faithful Latter-day Saints, those early converts brought into the Church considerable overburden along with the ore of their faith. They were guilty of very human lapses in their commitment to God—not all were, but enough to bring a lessening of divine power and protection. In the fateful nine months covered in volume 4, the examples of minor pettiness and major abandonment of covenants abound. In one place we find a leader of a settlement too stubborn to listen to a prophet’s counsel. He lives to see the tragic folly of his pride. In another, there is the myopia of a senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve who sides with his wife against the First Presidency. Within days his bitterness burns so hot, he leaves his brethren and swears out an official and slanderous deposition against Joseph Smith and the Saints. That deposition becomes a major factor in Governor Boggs’s decision to issue his infamous extermination order. The examples are legion.

Are they so different from us? We look back on some of those early members and say, “How could they have been so foolish? How could they have been so blind?” And even as we speak, some of us are stung by real or imaginary wrongs—some petty, some momentous—and we chafe and murmur and sour and sometimes take ourselves out of the Church. Will future generations look on our lives and wag their heads: “How could
they
have been so foolish?”

Those few terrible months in Missouri bring a lesson that should cause us sober reflection. There are no warranties against wavering. Aligning ourselves with the Lord and his cause is a commitment that must be made again and again, day after day. Unless we ground ourselves in faith, sink down our foundations to the bedrock of Jesus Christ, and commit ourselves to follow those whom he has called to lead us, we too may falter and fall.

The second image—that of the forge—carries an equally powerful lesson for modern Saints. Through Isaiah, the Lord spoke of bringing forth an instrument from the coals to do God’s work. As any blacksmith can tell you, you don’t get steel without fire, and you don’t make steel instruments without hammer, tongs, and anvil.

Missouri was the Lord’s forge! A raging inferno swept across those northern plains, but emerging from the smoke and the flames to cross the river into Illinois was a people of steel—a people who would abandon homes and farms and livestock and even their very lives before they would abandon their faith; a people who no longer thought only of their own survival but covenanted to take their poor with them or not survive at all; a people who would carve a city from a swamp and send emissaries out far enough and wide enough that they would see their numbers double in the next six years.

Joseph was the “Smith” the Lord chose to lead the Saints through the fire and to help forge an instrument for achieving what He himself called “my work and my glory” (Moses 1:39). And Joseph Smith was not exempt from the process of being made into steel. He too was an instrument to be hammered out in the forge of the Lord so that God could use him for his divine purposes. Joseph felt the scathing fires of apostasy in Kirtland. He saw betrayal and treachery in Far West. He sat for months in the hellhole of a place ironically named Liberty Jail.

From that loathsome dungeon in Liberty, he himself cried out in anguish, “O God, where art thou?” (D&C 121:1.) The answers came,  as recorded in a letter to the Saints, and a century and a half later they still ring like the hammer striking steel:

“Peace be unto thy soul.”

“Thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment.”