Solomon Chamberlain's Vision of the Night — Jesus Christ Appears to Him Face to Face (c. 1816)

Solomon Chamberlain (1788–1862), a restless religious seeker from Canaan, Connecticut, who had joined the Methodists at nineteen and later the Reformed Methodists, remained dissatisfied with the churches of his day and prayed earnestly for further guidance. In a vision of the night around 1816, he experienced one of the most striking personal manifestations of the Savior recorded in the early Restoration era. In his autobiography he wrote: "It seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face." He described the manifestation with vivid, physical specificity: "It seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man." He recorded beholding the Savior in visible, bodily form: "Below him stood Jesus Christ my Redeemer, in perfect shape like a man—His face was not ablaze, but had the countenance of fire, being bright and shining." The appearance of the Redeemer to Chamberlain in this night vision became one of the formative experiences of his life, preparing him to recognize the restored gospel when, guided by the Spirit in 1829, he was led to the Smith family in Palmyra and became one of the very first to receive the printed pages of the Book of Mormon. Years later, in a more rationalist age, Chamberlain would reflect on the experience as "a mental state"; yet at the time of the vision he insisted he had seen the Savior as plainly as he would see any other man. Historian Richard Lyman Bushman has cited this account as evidence of the vibrant visionary culture that prepared early Saints such as Chamberlain to receive latter-day revelation without doubt.

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

I further saw in 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. I then believed in gifts and miracles as the Latter-day Saints do, for which I was much persecuted and called deluded. This vision I received from an angel or spirit from the eternal world that told me these things.