Cecil B. DeMille’s Thoughts on Brigham Young

 

Cecille B. DeMille

You have a last name that other famous people may share. If you do, like I do, then I’m certain you’ve been asked at one time or another if you’re related to them. It doesn’t happen so much anymore, but in my younger days I was asked many times if I was related to the famous game show host Bob Barker. I recall well a missionary companion I had whose last name was DeMille. It never failed that whenever we went tracting he would often be asked if he was related to the famous movie director Cecil B. DeMille. For those of you who may not be familiar with this man, he’s the individual that directed the movie “The Ten Commandments,” the version with Charleton Heston playing the part of Moses. Cecil, who is not LDS, once compared Brigham Young to which Old Testament prophet?

a.      Enoch

b.      Isaiah

c.       Moses

d.      Noah

Yesterday’s answers:

1.      A.   March of 1836

Elijah Abel, an early black convert, pioneer, and missionary, was ordained an Elder on March 3, 1836. Zebedee Coltrin ordained Elijah a Seventy on December 20 that same year. In 1908, Joseph F. Smith stated his understanding that Joseph Smith himself declared Abel’s ordination “null and void.” President Smith offered no basis for that assertion. Abel did not believe that his ordination had ever been nullified. And twenty-nine years earlier, in 1879, Joseph F. Smith noted that Elijah Abel had two certificates identifying him as a seventy, one of them issued in Utah.

Jessie L. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1994), 39; Excerpts from Council minutes August 26, 1908, Kimball Papers; Edward L. Kimball, “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood, BYU Studies, Vol. 47, no. 2 (2008), 8.

2.      D.   Brigham Young

The first Church President to teach about the priesthood and “the Africans” was Brigham Young.

Journal History of the Church, February 13, 1849, Church History Library.

3.      A.   William Smith

Walker Lewis was ordained an elder by the Prophet Joseph Smith’s brother William Smith in 1843 or 1844 in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Connell O’Donovan, “The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 26 (2006), 48 and particularly pages 82-95.