| OCR Text |
Show 233 he did not look as crestfallen as Lorin suspected he should when they left his house for the last time. As the junior companion, Lorin tended to let Sorenson do most of the talking, though they took turns, as the custom was, giving the first discussion, or the second discussion, and so on. Lorin's powers of improvisation ran thinner in some places than in others, which meant that at times it was best to let him fade into silence. He was not particularly good, for instance, in discussions about covenants and faith, so Sorenson usually took over there, but he could be luminous on the subjects of revelation or inspired translation, or devils or angels. It was a fruitful marriage of temperaments, and in just a few months' time the two of them had conjured belief in three or four investigators, and had baptized two of these already, in the swimming pool of the local YMCA, with several elders from their zone, as well as the zone and district leaders and the mission president himself and one of his counsellors in attendance. It was interesting to Lorin to see which aspect of church doctrine or arcanum had turned the tide for which new convert, because everybody had a different point where resistance fell. With Mr. Atherton it had been the promised reunion with his wife, who had died a dozen years ago. With the Streatleys it had been the presence of authority in the restored priesthood, which Methodism made no claim to and which they had found a serious omission. With Virginia Morris, a graduate student in linguistics at the Catholic university in Detroit, it had been as much as anything else a reference in the Book of Mormon to elephants on the American continents when no elephant fossils had been discovered at the time the book was written. It was a good record, and he was now ripe for catastrophe. * * * * * * |
