BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
Elsworth, Benjamin C. A collection of sacred hymns, for the Church of Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Selected and published by Benjamin C. Elsworth . Printed for the publisher: 1839.
iv[5]-152[i]-vii pp. 10.5 cm.
Little is known about Benjamin C. Elsworth. On November 16, 1836, John E. Page ordained him a teacher at a conference in South Crosby, twenty–five miles north of Kingston, Canada, and fifteen months later he was chosen a member of the Second Quorum of Seventy. Elsworth reported on October 18, 1840, that he had been laboring in the vicinity of Oswego County, New York, and had baptized one hundred or so people during the preceding year. In April 1844 he was assigned to stump for Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign in New York. One year later he was excommunicated, apparently because he aligned himself with James J. Strang.
Elsworth was appointed to the office of apostle in the Strangite church in 1847 but was never ordained, and later that year Strang excommunicated him “for teaching and practicing the spiritual wife system.” The following year Elsworth joined another Strangite dissident Joseph Robinson in a new church in Franklin, Illinois, which apparently had a short life. At that point he seems to have dropped from sight, until 1871, when he was baptized into the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, on McKisick Island, ten miles down the Missouri River from Nebraska City, where he had been living for a number of years.
Since Elsworth is known to have been laboring in the vicinity of Oswego County, New York, during the latter part of 1839, it is likely he published his hymnal in that area. Elsworth’s hymnal is based almost totally on the Emma Smith 1835 (see this digital collection) and the 1838 David Rogers hymnal. Its preface is verbatim that of the 1835 Kirtland hymnbook. It contains the texts of 112 songs, and its first eighty–eight songs are those of the Rogers hymnal, in the same order. Seventeen others are taken from the 1835 hymnbook. Of the remaining seven hymns, four appear in the Messenger and Advocate. At the end are Index to Find Hymns, Under Different Heads and an index of first lines.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]). Item 61, p. 96-97.
Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.