Mormon Publications: 19th Century - The only way to be saved

SNOW, Lorenzo. The only way to be saved. An explanation of the first principles of the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By Lorenzo Snow, an American missionary. London: Printed by D. Chalmers, 26, John's Row, St. Luke's. 1841. 12 pp. 18.5 cm.

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On February 11, 1841, Lorenzo Snow took the train from Birmingham to London, and three days later he assumed the leadership of the London Conference which included the forty-six member London branch. For the next twenty months he would labor in London. During his first year there he would add more than a hundred new members and write the most widely published of all the nineteenth-century Mormon tracts, The Only Way to Be Saved.

Snow's journal includes a copy of a letter to his parents, dated at London, November 11, 1841, in which he remarks:

I have sent you a tract which I have written and got published I have published four thousand copies. It is expected that another Edition will be wanted. Tho' they have been out of the press only a week or two yet they have been mostly spoken for.

His journal also contains the entry: "The year 1842 wrote and published five thousand copies of a tract which I entitled 'The Only Way to Be Saved' and circulated this [in] the City and Conference."

The Only Way to Be Saved follows Heber C. Kimball's and Wilford Woodruff's Word of the Lord to the Citizens of London in discussing Mormonism's first principles: faith in Jesus Christ, repentance from sin, and baptism by immersion and the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost by someone with authority from God. But Snow's tract is the more carefully reasoned and persuasive tract, its arguments buttressed with many biblical proof-texts and examples. The Only Way to Be Saved marks a small shift away from polemic to a more apologetic form of writing. During the nineteenth century, it was reprinted in English at least twenty times and published in Armenian, Bengali, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Swedish.

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 129, p. 174.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.