Wailuku

Authors

Keywords

congregationalist meeting house, Wailuku, Hawaii

Abstract

Two days after Cannon, Bigler, and Keeler arrived in Maui, they began studying the language. Without formal language instruction, Cannon appealed to the Lord in prayer and fasting for the gift of tongues.1 The missionary efforts of George Q. Cannon were the first to bear significant fruit in the Hawaiian Islands. It is recorded that on March 4, 1851, Cannon left his companions in Lahaina and made his way in bad weather to Wailuku. On his way to Wailuku, Cannon felt that “he was to meet someone who would be interested in his message and who would be willing to care for his needs.”2 On Sunday, March 30, 1851, Cannon listened to Reverend D. T. Conde preach against the Latter-day Saints in the Congregationalist meetinghouse in Wailuku. Cannon records that in his sermon, Conde said, “Joseph Smith had pretended to see angels…. and claimed that an angel had taken away the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated, which, if genuine, should have been left for all the world to see.…called Joseph Smith ‘a notoriously bad character,’ a thief, a lawbreaker, a dissolute rake with ‘many wives or concubines’—in short, ‘a very wicked man.’ If Joseph Smith had truly seen angels….why did they not deliver him from death?” Miraculously, Cannon understood what Condie had said in Hawaiian, even though he did not feel like he was fluent enough to respond to Condie’s charges in Hawaiian. Cannon wrote in his journal, “‘My feelings while sitting listening to this tirade, can be better imagined than described. I felt as though if I had owned the world I should have given it to have been able to have talked the Native. I thought of standing up after meeting and contradicting but I thought he had the pulpit & could out talk me.’ After the meeting, Cannon went to Condie and asked if he could ‘inform him better in regard to the things he had told this people’ so that Condie could ‘disabuse the people of the lies he had told them.’” Condie brushed aside the implication that he had spread lies, and Cannon challenged him to prove Mormonism wrong from the scriptures. Cannon declared, “I can prove before this whole people that what you preach is not the gospel of Jesus Christ according to the scriptures.”3

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

(2012) "Wailuku," Mormon Pacific Historical Society: Vol. 33, Article 10.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/mphs/vol33/iss1/10