A Solemn Covenant

In the revelation to Brigham Young at Winter Quarters, the Lord said this, “Let each company bear an equal proportion, according to the dividend of their property, in taking the poor, the widows, the fatherless, and the families of those who have gone into the army, that the cries of the widow and the fatherless come not up into the ears of the Lord against this people” (D&C 136:8).  To me this was one of the themes of Brigham Young’s leadership over the Saints as they made difficult journeys at the peril of their lives.  For example, when Brigham Young found out about the plight of many Saints who left Nauvoo later than the main body and who were in dire straits in late 1846, he urged the Saints, “Let the fire of the covenant which you made in the House of the Lord, burn in your hearts, like flame unquenchable, till you, by yourselves or delegates…. [can] rise up with his team and go straightway, and bring a load of the poor from Nauvoo….  This is a day of action and not of argument.”  He was adamant that the most poor and destitute of the Saints be helped and brought to be with the body of Saints.    

This was not the first time, though, that he had worked to save the poor and needy in such a journey.  In the winter of 1838-1839 Joseph Smith was in Liberty Jail and Brigham was the de facto leader to get the Saints to Illinois during the harsh conditions.  He created the “Committee on Removal” to help with the exodus and worked to ensure that all, especially the poor, could make it out of Missouri.  Several hundred of the Saints “covenanted to place all of their available property at the disposal of the committee ‘for the purpose of providing means for the removing from the state of the poor and destitute who shall be considered worthy, till there shall not be one left who desires to remove from the state.’”  He was totally devoted to ensuring that all Saints were cared for and that the most vulnerable were helped.  Later in 1846 when Brigham Young was preparing to move the Saints west he “prompted the Latter-day Saints to enter into a solemn covenant in the temple, that they would not cease their exertions until every individual of them who desired and was unable to gather to the valley by his own means was brought to that place.”  It was this covenant that ultimately led to the creation of the Perpetual Emigration Fund to help the poor come to Zion.  And perhaps the most famous example of Brigham Young’s devotion to helping the needy get to Zion was his call in 1856 to rescue the handcart pioneers: “I will tell you all that your faith, religion, and profession of religion, will never save one soul of you in the Celestial Kingdom of our God, unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you.  Go and bring in those people now on the plains.” 

              Brigham Young was devoted to the needs of the most vulnerable of the Saints and surely left us a valuable legacy about how we should view our responsibility to those in need around us.  One of the messages of D&C 136 was that those pioneers should not just think about their own needs but that they should care for all the Saints, even preparing houses and planting crops for those who would come behind; in short the Lord admonished them, “Let every man use all his influence and property to remove this people to the place where the Lord shall locate a stake of Zion” (v10).  Perhaps the Lord wishes us to  extend this responsibility they had to ourselves and see it as our own duty to likewise use our “influence and property” to help all those around us in temporally and to help the Saints spiritually come to Zion.