Gordon Hackney was baptized in 1926, at age 10. His mother had been a member since before her marriage, but his father never joined; his grandmother had also been a member much of her life, but Gordon’s grandfather never joined. The family lived in Kentucky, deep in the Southern States Mission where so many Saints were scattered far from organized branches, yet here was a family who had passed the gospel down through three generations.

By the time he was 16, Gordon was serious about living as a Latter-day Saint, keeping the commandments to the best of his ability. Yet he was worried – very worried. When he was 12 or 13 years old, he said, “I ran around with a friend of mine who was a year or so older than I was. When we were out he would curse and smoke and at times would take things that did not belong to him. And during this time I am sorry to say I yielded to temptation and would once in a while say something I should not say or would not dare say around any of my other friends or people.” This is not the memory of an adult, many years after the fact, remembering and perhaps distorting the follies of youth. These are the words of the 16-year-old boy.

“I am afraid I might have blasphemed against the Holy Ghost,” Gordon confessed. “I am wondering if it is possible for a child at that age to blaspheme against the Holy Ghost and not be able to be pardoned even in eternity. At that time I was one who would yield to temptation and did not think so much of the future as I do now nor did I try to live according to the Gospel as I live now nor I did not understand the Gospel as clearly as I do now.”

What a thing to disturb the thoughts of a young boy! Yet, I suppose it isn’t so very different from the concerns of the young Joseph Smith, who, concerned about the state of his soul, took his fears and questions to God in the spring of 1820. Gordon, though, committed his own worries to paper, and wrote to James E. Talmage, one of the most senior apostles of the Church.

“Knowing that you are an authority on Mormonism, I write to you for your explanation on the sin against the Holy Ghost. Is it absolutely impossible for a member of the Church who is twelve or fifteen years of age to commit an unpardonable sin?”

He did not, however, explain to Elder Talmage about his actions as a 12-year-old, nor even mention his age at the time of his writing. He simply asked the question, leaving Elder Talmage to guess at what was troubling him.

The unpardonable sin was “of very rare occurrence,” he assured Gordon. “The plan of salvation provides for the remission of sins through earnest repentance and baptism, followed by earnest effort to live according to the laws of God.” It “consists essentially in wilful opposition to the laws of righteousness, after the Holy Ghost has borne witness to the individual that the laws thus opposed are the laws of God. In my opinion no one can commit this extreme sin unless he has received the gift of the Holy Ghost and an individual testimony of Jesus Christ as the Son of the Eternal Father, and of the Holy Ghost Himself as a member of the Godhead.

“I think it very unlikely that a person as young as you specify could commit this ‘unpardonable sin.’”

Having answered the question as asked, perhaps many leaders would have simply closed the letter. But Elder Talmage, sensing that there was something more than curiosity behind his unknown correspondent’s question, turned from “authority on Mormonism” to a minister of the gospel.

“Now, my dear Brother, if you care to you may write to me again and tell me just what offense you have in mind in the case you present; and in the meantime be of good cheer and try to do the best you can to live in accordance with what you know to be right, and encourage the one whom you have in mind and your other associates to live in the same way.”

Gordon answered Elder Talmage the very day he received that invitation, spilling out his fear that his behavior just as he left childhood for youth had blighted his eternal future. He was “glad,” he wrote, to learn the truth, and would make that “earnest effort to live according to the laws of God.”

Gordon went on to serve a mission in Western Canada, serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, marry and raise a family, earn a Master’s degree in history from BYU, and work in education. (I never met him, but I might have – he married a second time late in life, and that marriage record shows that he and I were in the same place at the same time.) After a lifetime of living and working and serving in the Church in many places around the United States, Gordon died in 1997, and is buried near where he was born, in Kentucky.