Review: Aird, “Without Purse or Scrip”

October 20, 2006 Ronan

EMSA intends to offer brief reviews of recent publications. Below is a review of Polly Aird, “Without Purse or Scrip in Scotland,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought 39(2):46-69, Summer 2006. (Available for free download.)

Aird’s article explores the myth of 19th century Mormon “without purse or scrip” proselytising and “tethers the myth” to actual experiences of missionaries in Scotland. She focuses on the missions of local Scottish elders — mostly recent converts — whose experiences were often different to their American brethren (who, according to Aird, were “sometimes treated like near royalty” [46]). She concentrates her study on the 1840s and 1850s, the period of greatest 19th century LDS missionary activity in Scotland.

For sources she uses thirteen journals of Scottish travelling elders as well as various reports published by the Glasgow and Edinburgh Conferences and the Millennial Star.

The injunction for missionaries to travel without “purse or scrip” (a bag) was given first by Jesus in Luke 10:1-7 and reiterated in D&C 84:86.

“Taken literally, the missionaries were to go forth, preach the gospel to strangers, and depend on the charity and hospitality of those willing to listen” [48].

When hospitality could not be found, money was needed (strictly speaking raising money, as many Mormon missionaries did, was not permitted in Jesus’ scenario). The elders, the families they were leaving, and the people they travelled amongst were mostly poor. When donations from church members were not forthcoming, some of the elders were reduced to begging and sleeping rough.

Matthew Rowan described what happened with two who were sent into the Highlands at the same time as he and his companion in the summer of 1849:

“Elders [Hugh] Fulton and [Samuel] Lindsay who were sent out with us to Argyleshire [sic] and who laboured on the Campbelltown side, got along rather worse than us. They got into a system of begging more than any thing else; and they soon had the County, or rather their part of the County, begged out and they had latterly to lie out in the open air and anywhere else they could creep into at night, and before their Mission was up they had to return” [51].

Vagrancy laws soon made the begging of able-bodied men even less savoury.

When the money ran out, some elders returned home or took sabbaticals to earn money both for their missionary activities and to provide for their families (”God did not require me nor any other man to starve ourselves to death” [62]).

The work of the travelling elders coincided with a rise in converts in Scotland, although Aird points out that this may have had more to do with Orson Pratt’s prolific and persuasive pamphleteering than the elders themselves. Also, most of the success was found in the central, populated belt of Scotland whereas the elders often worked in more rural areas.

In a very real sense, travelling “without purse or scrip” was counterproductive:

Certainly the elders’ writings show that much of their time in the field was taken up with how to find some thing to eat and where they would spend the night. Such concerns at times appeared to demand precedence over the purpose of their mission.

In other words, taking “no concern” over purse or scrip turned out to be an impossible venture.

How did the elders view their missions? When they speak of it they often recount positive feelings of friendship and faith. There was a real sense for the missionaries that they were acting like apostles of old, thus strengthening their faith in a restoration of the Primitive Church.

Aird tells an interesting story of a bygone missionary age for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It would certainly be valuable to view these accounts in a wider psycho-social setting: many Mormon missionaries in Europe today speak of hardships coupled with little success (”suffering for the Lord” is a catchphrase one often hears). Is the value of their missions to the church measured in converts or in the inculcation of Mormon values that a mission very often provides? In a real sense it is the latter, a phenomenon also to be found in 1840s Scotland.