I just thought it was interesting that such things were even asked back then. My great grandfather was somewhere between 9 and 13 at that time anyway.
We’ve been digging around in the family tree and finding old documents in Michigan and Wisconsin. I discovered that my grandfather began his life as a Catholic but became a Methodist during WWII. Nobody in the family ever talked about it so I assumed he had always been Methodist.
Well, all those ancestors are probably mormon now.
“We have been authorized to perform baptisms vicariously so that when they hear the gospel preached and desire to accept it, that essential ordinance will have been performed. They need not ask for any exemption from that essential ordinance. Indeed, the Lord Himself was not exempted from it.
Here and now then, we move to accomplish the work to which we are assigned. We are busily engaged in that kind of baptism. We gather the records of our kindred dead, indeed, the records of the entire human family; and in sacred temples in baptismal fonts designed as those were anciently, we perform these sacred ordinances.
“Strange,” one may say. It is passing strange. It is transcendent and supernal. The very nature of the work testifies that He is our Lord, that baptism is essential, that He taught the truth.
And so the question may be asked, “You mean you are out to provide baptism for all who have ever lived?”