March 1, 2011
To: My loved ones
From: Dad, Grandpa etc. Richard Marden Pratt
Re: Continuation of personal life in a distressed world
(NOTE: Some of you have asked if you can share these with other folks. YES! Dad would want that. He has such an amazing testimony and hoped that his study and faith and prayers and good works would draw people to Jesus Christ. You are also welcome to comment on the blog site as well.)
From the time Lehi left Jerusalem 600 B.C. until the final destruction of the Nephites about 385 A.D. covers one thousand years. What most of us don’t catch is that the wicked Nephites were destroyed twice during that one thousand years. Which indicates that the average dispensation of the gospel lasts about three hundred to three hundred and fifty years. In last month’s memo you read about the destruction at the coming of Jesus to the survivors at his crucifixion and resurrection. The first destruction took place about 320 years after leaving Jerusalem and is briefly mentioned in Omni V.5 “Behold, it came to pass that three hundred and twenty years had passed away, and the more wicked part of the Nephites were destroyed.”
Fourth Nephi fills only four pages and covers nearly three hundred years from total righteousness to preparation for total destruction. Or in other words the 530 pages of the Book of Mormon would only be about twelve pages long if righteousness had always prevailed. But it didn’t neither is it now. And I’ll cover that in some detail as soon as I finish this currant theme of “Personal life in a distressed world.”
But always remember that the obedient who suffer a martyr’s death in war or no matter the cause, will receive a martyr’s reward which is all that the Father hath to give.
“For the eternal purposes of the Lord shall roll on, until all his promises shall be fulfilled.” Mormon 8:22
“And if we will but cleanse ourselves and our covenant before God, to serve HIM, it is our privilege to have an assurance that God will protect us at all times.”
“Until we have perfect love we are liable to fall and when we have a testimony that our names are sealed in the Lambs book of Life we have perfect love and then it is impossible for false Christs to deceive us.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith page 9)
Moroni finished the record of his father Mormon after the awful battle at Cumorah where his father was killed. Moroni writes what is now chapters eight and nine in Mormon’s personal book.
That terrible battle resulted in the lives of millions being destroyed around the little hill Cumorah, a very small hill perhaps two or three hundred feet high, one quarter of a mile long and two or three hundred feet wide and rises up out of the surrounding plains. The early settlers in the area had to clear the ground of human bones before they could farm it. One of the early farmers not knowing what to do with the bones built a large shed and filled it with the remains.
In the monastery at the foot of Mt. Sainai built about 600 A.D. the monks have preserved their predecessors bones in a like manner. One room contains just skulls an estimated fifteen hundred of them. Two other rooms are filled with the rest of the bones stacked like cord wood. Quite an interesting sight. Mother and I had the privilege of staying overnight at the Monastery when we were in Palestine. Not in the same room however.
Moroni reports: “My father hath been slain in battle, and all my kinsfolk, and I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not...and behold, the Lamanites have hunted my people, the Nephites, down from city to city and from place to place, even until they are no more; and great has been their fall; yea, even great and marvelous is the destruction of my people, the Nephites.” Mormon 8:5-7
So far as Moroni knew there were no surviving righteous but himself. And apparently he lived the last twenty to twenty five years of his life without meeting a single survivor. But there were some survivors and one modern group are the Hopi Indians, now numbering about five thousand souls living on a reservation in Northern Arizona. I wrote about them several memos back but will give a brief refresher here.
Archaeology indicates that the Hopi village of Old Oribi is the oldest continually lived in settlement in North America and date its settlement back to about four hundred A.D. when the last battles of Lamanites and Nephites were being wages.
The Hopi legends of their people are as follows. A few families were fleeing from a terrible war. Their leader had a vision in which he was shown that if they fled westward they would come to ten mesas (a mesa is a mountain with a flat top and cliffs dropping off all the way around for four or five hundred feet. The flat top varies in size but appears to be about one city block square on the average. And in the case of these mesas there was a spring of cold sweet water at the base of each. The mesa of Holtvill, which we were familiar with, had four hundred stone steps they had carved in the cliff side down to the spring. I know, I carried water up from that spring, counting the steps, using four one gallon milk jugs that’s thirty two pounds. You didn’t need to go to the “health spa” after a couple of daily trips, and you didn’t waste water.
On top of each mesa they had, over the centuries, erected a communal home all three stories high. The first story sat back about twenty five feet from the cliff edge, the next two stories receded back from the story below several feet and it had a flat roof covered with brush over large poles and covered with twelves inches or more of clay. All building materials had to be carried up from the valley below over a precarious trail and ladders. They had been at it for fifteen hundred years.
One village or mesa named Pollaca now has a passable car road to the top. It was surely scary to drive up and down. And when you started there was no turning around and going back. We did it just once.
There was no barrier of any kind on the cliff edge. So the kids had that narrow strip between the buildings edge and the cliff edge to play on. I asked do your kids fall off? And the answer was, “Yes, we lose one now and then.” Today many have their homes down on the valley floor.
They are a peaceful people and have never gone to war against any others. They exist by a unique harvesting of the scanty rain fall and are farmers. The Spanish conquistadores tried to defeat them but had no luck. The Hopis would just retire to their Mesa tops and drop rocks on anyone trying to scale the cliffs. They always had a year or more supply of water and food up there with them and still do. So after a few hopeless tries the Spanish pretty well left them alone.
However the Catholic fathers did a little better and managed to convert one of the villages, but as soon as they had moved on the men from the other nine villages waited until the meeting day when all the men and boys twelve and older were gathered in the Kiva for a “priesthood meeting” (The Kiva is underground and accessed by entering the hole at the top about three feet square and descending a ladder. There is no other opening. The attackers threw burning brush down the hole covered it with a lid, stood on it until the trapped ones suffocated.
The women and children were dispersed thru out the other mesas to live. The mesa has never been re-occupied. This was about four hundred years ago when the Spanish were exploring the West.
No other Christian church has been successful in proselyting them until about fifty years ago and because their ancient religion is so near the truth they are now joining in large number and I believe we have large branches at each village but not on the top of the mesa.
They baptize by immersion, we have been to the centralized pool. They practice a form of what they hope is eternal marriage, all dressed in white. Priesthood starts at the age of twelve and many other practices that indicate that they once had the true church of Jesus Christ. Oh! They had a form of home teaching too. Every old person or couple or incapacitated had assigned to them a teen age boy who called on them every day to see to their needs, like water, wood etc. and they were very faithful about it. They also addressed each other as brother and sister.
Back to the final battle between the Lamanites and Nephites. Mormon records that when he was eleven years old in the year 322 A.D. that his family moved from the country to the great city of Zarahemla. He was so amazed at the dense population that he recorded, “The whole face of the land had been covered with buildings, and the people were as numerous almost, as it were the sand of the sea.” 1:7
And a war began that year, but wickedness did prevail upon the whole face of the earth. And the Lord took away his beloved disciples, and the work of miracles and of healing did cease because of the iniquity of the people. They were ripe for destruction. As a fourteen year old boy he tried to preach righteousness to them but his mouth was shut, and he was forbidden that he should preach to them. For they had wilfully rebelled against their God and the beloved disciples were taken away out of the land because of the their iniquity.
But I did remain among them, but I was forbidden to preach unto them, because of the hardness of their hearts; and because of the hardness of their hearts the land was cursed for their sakes.
And then an amazing thing happened. Although he was only in his sixteenth year he was large in stature, the Nephites appointed him to be their leader. For earlier in the book of Alma it tells us that they always chose a prophet to be their commanding officer. For the next sixty years, except when he refused to lead them, he led them in their struggles against the Lamanites.
Now in hand to hand combat the general leads his troops and is the first to meet the enemy and must kill each man that approaches him or be killed. In fifty years of fighting I wonder how many of the Lamanites he personally sent to the happy hunting ground.
And he wrote, “it is impossible for the tongue to describe, or for man to write a perfect description of the horrible scene of the blood and carnage which was among the people, both of the Nephites and of the Lamanites; and every heart was hardened, so that they delighted in the shedding of blood.” Mormon 4:11
In the meantime he is recording all this and abridging the thousand years of Nephite records and depositing them in their final resting place in Cumorah until that wonderful day when his son, Moroni turns them over to the boy prophet Joseph Smith. September 22, 1827 who translated them by the power of God from whence we have our knowledge of those ancient days in the Americas between the years six hundred B.C. and four hundred A.D.
From that date until Columbus discovered America twelve hundred years later the descendant of the Lamanites remained in a stone age culture. Man on the way down and not on his way up.
In his last recorded message to his beloved son Moroni, Mormon wrote; “My beloved son, notwithstanding their hardness let us labor diligently; for if we should cease to labor, we should be brought under condemnation; for we have a labor to perform whilst in this tabernacle of clay, that we may conquer the enemy of all righteousness and rest our souls in the kingdom of God.” Moroni 9:6
This was the second people to be destroyed in the Americas, the “Etherites” having preceded the Nephites, Satan had won again.
And he wasn’t doing too bad in the Eastern half of the world either. The great Empire geographically that the world has known was also going to its destruction. Within seventy five years the Roman Empire fell. The date 476 A.D. while they didn’t sink to a stone age culture they were not far from it as all of Europe, the Near East, and Northern Africa all part of that great empire went into a thousand year period known in history as the Dark Ages.
The dark ages was a terrible time to live. One wonders what method God used to choose spirits to be born into mortality under such adverse conditions. All of Europe fell into a decline. The splendid roads developed by the Romans became miserable ruts, fields went back to forests. Towns shrunk to large villages. Travel was only safely done with a strong armed guard.
Cleanliness was unknown. King Henry the eighth was never known to bathe. Perfume came into vogue as a cover up for human stench. Only the elite had any heat in winter and that was a fireplace in those huge stone castles which themselves would have been ice boxes.
The peasants lived in an igloo shaped arrangement of willows woven together and plastered with clay. No doors, just an opening covered by a hanging skin, no windows, no furniture, just a raised platform to sleep on, and raised to keep the cow, pig or other animal out of your bed as they had been brought into your abode to help furnish some warmth. Aren’t you glad you live now?
At its peak less than five percent of the people could read and write. And these few, who kept learning alive, were dedicated monks living in isolated monasteries. Famous Joan of Arc lived in that era. Hers is an exciting story but can’t write it here.
Gutenberg came up with the printing press in the middle fourteen hundreds. At that time not more than twelve thousand hand written books existed in all of Europe. By the end of the 1400's over two million books existed. Finally Satan was on the run.
Visit the Crandall Printing Museum in Provo, Utah and see replicas of those early presses built by my son Stephen and his son Ben and an original Bible from Gutenberg’s first printing all of which made it possible and led to the restoration of the true church of Christ upon the earth for the last time. I bare you my testimony that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is on the earth and it is true. Learn it, love it and live it.
My love always,
Dad, Grandpa etc. Richard M. Pratt
