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.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

The Lord revealed to me in a vision of the night an angel. I thought if I could ask him, he could tell me all I wanted to know. I accordingly asked him if we were right. He said not one of us were right, and that there were no people on earth that were right; but that the Lord would in his own due time raise up a church, different from all others, and he would give power and authority as in the days of Christ; and he would carry it through, and it should never be confounded; and that I should live to see the day, and know the work when it came forth; and that great persecution should follow. I further saw in the vision, that he would soon raise up a Church, that would be after the Apostolic Order, that there would be in it the same powers, and gifts that were in the days of Christ, and that I should live to see the day, and that there would a book come forth, like unto the Bible and the people would be guided by it, as well as the Bible. This was in the year of 1816.