Frank Warren Smith (1863-1946) was a native of Pennsylvania. He was a scientist, having earned a Master’s degree in chemistry from Harvard, followed by additional study in France and Germany. He authored several works on chemistry – at least one of which was a standard textbook at Harvard – and he amassed a large collection of scientific books, primarily chemistry, which he donated to Brigham Young University after he was converted to the Church.

F.W. Smith’s health – both mental and physical – was always somewhat fragile. Seeking a warm climate and privacy, he settled in Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1915, where he lived more or less as a hermit. He studied native plants, raised an extraordinary garden, specializing in exotic fruits, and, with his knowledge of chemistry, informally doctored his Mexican neighbors. Once in Mexico, he had little direct contact with the Church but faithfully paid his tithing by checks through the mail. Despite the poverty that came with his self-sufficient but low-income desert lifestyle, he somehow managed to travel occasionally – to Salt Lake, to Pennsylvania, to Italy, to England. He planned other trips that never came to be, when his nerves and breathing difficulties kept him at home in Mexico.

He carried on long correspondence (long letters, over long periods) with a few friends who appreciated or at least tolerated his quirky, sometimes incomprehensible rambling letters. On other occasions, his letters are completely lucid – any difficulty in understanding him then is due to obscure allusions, sophisticated topics, and complex sentence structure.

Below is one such letter – the lucid kind – that describes his path to joining the Church. It isn’t easy reading, but there are some gems in there. F.W. Smith is completely unknown to Church history, yet he was very much one of us. I hope you find something here to appreciate.

-oOo-

Socialism had much attraction for me in my early years and I greedily gobbled up Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” At the time it seemed like a new gospel. I also read with especial attention “Nordhof’s History of Commmunistic Societies in the US,” a book which is the best antidote for socialism that I know of. I never got to the point of joining any of those societies as they were pretty well moribund by 1880 and I never joined any church. My natural bent was towards the Protestant Episcopal Church but my parents attended first the Congregational and later the Baptist church and those bodies had no attraction for me. To this day I love the Book of Common Prayer and attend the PE services when I have nowhere else to go. Incidentally I will say what you have doubtless noted, that there is practically no difference between that church and the LDS. In San Jose I once heard a sermon in which the speaker propounded an idea for the salvation of the dead and the English newspaper that I formerly read once published an article in support of blood atonement.

While in college I read everything I could find about Mormonism except the Church publications which naturally were not included in the Harvard or Boston Public Libraries. By some accident I have never read Burton’s “City of the Saints.” The books I read did not influence me greatly against the church as the bias of hatred was too plainly evident. I became a believer in polygamy from biological and social consideration. Every woman has the right to experience maternity just as surely as she has the right to breathe.

The idea that I formed of the Mormon church was that of a body of ignorant deluded people led by a hierarchy of astute and perhaps unscrupulous men. My first contact with Mormons was in 1893 in Santa Rosalia in Mexico where I stopped at a hotel kept by an aged man, one of the pioneers, I guess, then I visited the Utah building at the Chicago Fair and passed through Salt Lake City in November. My first discovery was that the Mormons are sincere and no fools. Further I immediately felt at home in their company. I never felt at home in any other church. If I had fallen into the right hands at that time in SLC I would have joined the church then and there but I was repelled by the idea of a personal God. Evidently if God is a person he is not infinite because the term “infinite person” involves a contradiction. So I went to California and passed two years in mental unrest, struggling over that one point. It is certainly a terrible thing to believe in an anthropomorphic God, but I now perceive a way out of my difficulty. I was baptized in San Diego in August 1895. There is certainly no more beautiful place in the whole world than that bit of beach where I received the sacrament of baptism. I was invited to go to Utah but did not go because of my poor health. I had nervous prostration in 1887 and have never been able to stand cold weather since that time; so I lived in California (barring two years in New Orleans) until 1915 and have been here since then.

I have never lived in close contact with the church and perhaps it is better so for it has always been a part of my fate in this world to take the unpopular side of every question. I don’t approve of prohibition as I consider it the devil’s road to morality. I was on the German side in the world war as the defeat of Germany meant the rise of Japan, which is the unavoidable enemy of the US. The US has got to fight Japan some day and my greatest disapproval of Roosevelt arose from his failure to call the Japanese bluff in 1907. If he had fought Japan then, Germany, Austria, Russia, Canada and Australia would have sided with the US, but now conditions will be much worse when war comes and the outcome more doubtful. those are perhaps minor points of difference with the general run of opinion in the church.

My principal heresy lies in my belief in evolution and by evolution I mean not a self-contained, self-propelling system such as some persons seem to consider it but rather I would define evolution as God’s method of work in this world. To me evolution implies an evolver. I read recently in the NY Times an attack on evolution by that eminent biologist Mr. William Brennings Jyan [sic] in which he says, among other things, that there is nothing of evolution in the Bible. I venture to hold an opposite idea and I have written out my ideas which I submit to you separately. I am not seeking any quarrel with the church on this or any other point and shall certainly not give up my membership therein voluntarily. Of course if the church should cut me off that would be a different proposition.

In my early days scientific men as a natural revolt against both Protestant and RC theology of the 17 and 18th century were agnostic to atheistic. A belief in anything not directly measurable in Centimeter, Gram and Second was considered superstitious, even Crook’s experiments with spiritism met with a cold reception but a decided change has come over Science and we are coming back to an age of faith. Men have learned that God cannot be discovered in a test tube nor revealed by the microscope and are gradually coming back to search for God because man needs God. Man cannot live forever on the husks of materialism which even the swine reject but feels compelled to seek again his Father’s house and eat the true bread of life.

Modern Roman Catholicism as well as modern Protestantism has not succeeded in remodeling itself so as to appeal to the scientific mind and it is my hope that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints may become the abiding place of many thousands of engineers and biologists who feel the need of a sustaining faith, which, having this origin in each man’s soul, yet requires the fellowship of a visible church to give outward support and comfort to the man in his battle against the world. I can’t see anything in the Gospel of JC or in the tenets of his true church essentially hostile to modern science, except a misconception of the fundamentals of biology (a misconception which may exist on both sides) and which in my opinion can and should be removed. There is only one kind of truth in the world and all truth is harmonious so why may not the church accept the realities of modern science just as the men of science have come to admit the existence of forces and influences beyond the human senses. Is God less logical than Euclid, or is there any impiety in referring some of the miracles of Jesus to his knowledge of hyperspace? Is it entirely incomprehensible that Moses’s face shone with unendurable light after his interview with God on the mountain, or was that fact due to the reflection from God’s radioactive body? There is a lot about radium in the Bible if you take the trouble to look for it.

To restate my case in the simplest terms. Man needs religion and religion can come only through revelation – revelation to the individual that he may receive the truth and revelation to the leaders in the church that they may preach the truth and lead along the path of truth, and whether in physics or psychology all truth is consistent; to speak of biological truth as if it could e inconsistent with spiritual truth is an absurdity. Let a man’s faith in God cover all his life. Let the chemist pray for a revelation of chemical truth with the same simple faith that the little child exercises when he sends up his petition for the things his mind can grasp. Jesus established the gospel in its simplicity and power and many came under its influence but it required the talents and culture of Paul to introduce it to the polite world of his day. he went to Athens where there was an altar to the [Greek characters: Unknown God] and it was his duty to call into the church the men of science and the polite scoffers and sophists of the ancient world. Where is the modern Paul who will make the same compelling appeal to cultured Boston, busy New York and pleasure-mad Paris?

I won’t attempt to go further and am very glad of the opportunity to state my case to a sympathetic friend. I have been much impressed with the need for missionary effort in Mexico. The average Mexican is a lovable person and will flourish under the benefits of the gospel and while I have not preached to the people I prayed a great deal and have tried to live my religion and I have sent some names to the Lamanite society in SLC for baptism of the dead so as to make a beginning in Temple work and so perhaps help the later missionary efforts. I hope the church will not delay in forming more colonies here.