Heavenly Objects of Proxy Baptism

By mid-eighteenth century, two religious titans of the Anglo-Saxon world, erstwhile allies, were at loggerheads over the question of just how many people were destined for an eternity in hell. George Whitefield attacked John Wesley in 1740 for asserting “God’s grace is free to all.” Wesley had agonized over “How uncomfortable a thought is this, that thousands and millions of men, without any preceding offence or fault of theirs were unchangeably doomed to everlasting burnings!” Some, like Francis Okely, simply abandoned the restrictive hell: “Neither doeth it damn any Man, that he hath not the Word of God, if it is not given to him.” And some went on trial for so doing: Robert Breck was charged with believing “the heathen who obeyed the light of nature could be saved.”

In 1823, Joseph Smith claimed a visitation from an angelic messenger, who called himself Moroni. He recited to Smith a number of scriptures, one of which bore rich fruit in the early years of Mormonism. The book of Malachi ends with a cryptic prophecy of Elijah’s return to the earth, when he will “turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that [the Lord] will not come and strike the land with a curse.”