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Question

 

Dear Gramps,

My parents had 2 children before I was born and both died after three days of life on this earth. I have heard that my parents will be able to raise those babies in the millennium.   Is that true? Or are they just exalted into celestial beings?

Alan

 

Answer

 

Dear Alan,

President Joseph F. Smith, the sixth President of the Church, reported:  “Joseph Smith taught the doctrine that the infant child that was laid away in death would come up in the resurrection as a child; and, pointing to the mother of a lifeless child, he said to her:  ‘You will have the joy, the pleasure and satisfaction of nurturing this child, after its resurrection, until it reaches the full stature of its spirit.’ …

“In 1854, I met with my aunt [Agnes Smith], the wife of my uncle Don Carlos Smith, who was the mother of that little girl [Sophronia] that Joseph Smith, the Prophet, was speaking about, when he told the mother that she should have the joy, the pleasure, and the satisfaction of rearing that child, after the resurrection, until it reached the full stature of its spirit; and that it would be a far greater joy than she could possibly have in mortality, because she would be free from the sorrow and fear and disabilities of mortal life.  I met that widow, the mother of that child, and she told me this circumstance and bore testimony to me that this was what the Prophet Joseph Smith said when he was speaking at the funeral of her little daughter.”

These quotes appeared in the Improvement Era, May 1918 on page 571.  It is quoted in the instruction manual, The Teachings of the Presidents of the Church, Joseph Smith, and was used in the Melchizedek Quorums.  Also in this manual  on page 178 it states that Mary Isabella Horne and Leonora Cannon Taylor each lost a young child in death.  Sister Horne recalled that the Prophet Joseph Smith gave the two sisters these words of comfort:

“He told us that we should receive those children in the morning of the resurrection just as we laid them down, in purity and innocence, and we should nourish and care for them as their mothers.  He said that children would be raised in the resurrection just as they were laid down, and that they would obtain all the intelligence necessary to occupy thrones, principalities and powers.”  This is quoted from the History of the Church, volume 4, page 556.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie, in Mormon Doctrine, indicated that to us the morning of the first resurrection, the resurrection of the just, will come with the return of our Lord and the commencement of his millennial reign.

 

Gramps

 

 

 

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