Adam S. Bennion: 'No Preachment' at His Greatest Call (1953)

Adam Samuel Bennion (1886-1958) was sustained to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on April 9, 1953. Left fatherless at eighteen months and reared by his mother in the remote Rush Valley of Utah—where two of the Bennion children died for want of medical care—he rose from those humble beginnings to become superintendent of the Church School System (1919-1928), a board member of the Deseret Sunday School Union for thirty-eight years, and a beloved speaker throughout the Church. He loved to take out-of-town visitors to the crude one-room log cabin preserved behind the Pioneer Museum and then turn their eyes to the temple, that they might understand how the pioneers, living in log cabins, still dreamed dreams of a temple. When he was sustained at general conference as an apostle, he noted with quiet irony: 'For years I have been going up and down the land preaching—but in the hour of this greatest call I have no preachment.' After his death Elder Harold B. Lee observed that 'somehow he seemed to have in the wide sweep of his understanding soul, that quality which made him seemingly akin to all the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the young and the old.' His life is a faith-promoting witness that the Lord calls the humble and the fatherless to the holy apostleship, and fills them with a love that embraces every soul.