Solomon Chamberlain's Sixteen-Year Dream: A Church Restored to Apostolic Power

For approximately sixteen years before encountering the restored Church, Solomon Chamberlain experienced a recurring spiritual conviction — a dream or prophetic impression — that God would restore His Church to earth with the same gifts, powers, and authority held by the Apostles of the New Testament.

Chamberlain had searched earnestly through every Christian denomination he could find, but none satisfied the spiritual witness he carried. He wrote in his autobiography (circa 1858) that he had been persuaded for sixteen years that God would raise up a church that would have 'apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers' — the exact structure he read of in the New Testament — and that it would be accompanied by gifts of healing, tongues, and miracles.

This dream sustained him through years of spiritual restlessness and searching. It was this conviction that made him immediately recognize the Restoration when he encountered it in 1829 at Palmyra, New York — before the Church had even been formally organized.

'I had been for sixteen years... looking for the true church as it was in apostolic days,' Chamberlain wrote. When he finally met the Smith family and heard about the restoration of the priesthood and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, he declared it was the fulfillment of everything he had been shown.