While delivering an inspired discourse at the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Sunday, October 4, 1896, President Wilford Woodruff stated that while labouring in the St. George Temple, he had learned a new principle of the gospel pertaining to the redemption of the dead:
While in the St. George Temple I had a son, who was in the north country, drowned. He was 21 years of age, and was a faithful young man. He had a warning of this. In a dream he was notified how he would die. We had a testimony of that after his death. I asked the Lord why he was taken from me. The answer to me was, "You are doing a great deal for the redemption of your dead; but the law of redemption requires some of your own seed in the spirit world to attend to work connected with this". That was a new principle to me; but it satisfied me why he was taken away. I name this, because there are a great many instances like it among the Latter-day Saints.
Marriner Wood Merrill was a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles from 1889 and Logan Temple President from 1884 to 1906. Often his excessive temple labours fatigued him, which was later compounded by the death of one son, whose sudden passing Apostle Merrill could not reconcile. Finally, on one evening following his exhaustive temple work, the Logan Temple President received a visit from his deceased son from the spirit world as recounted by President Heber J Grant:
He once told me that he could not reconcile himself to the death of his son Marriner, who had had charge of practically all his financial affairs, as he gave so much of his time to the Temple, until he received a manifestation in which Marriner seemed to be in the room with him, although not seen, and spoke to his father and said: "Pa, I am where the Lord wants me to be. I am doing work of more importance than I would be on earth, and it is not pleasing to the Lord for you to grieve as you are doing over my death". He said this reconciled him to the loss.
In a Church general conference Rudger Clawson of the Quorum of the Twelve related a marvellous manifestation received by one faithful Salt Lake Temple worker in which the status of married couples in the spirit prison who have not been sealed for eternity in a temple was revealed:
Upon one occasion I saw in vision my father and mother who were not members of the Church, who had not received the gospel in life, and I discovered that they were living separate and apart in the spirit world, and when I asked them how it was that they were so, my father said, "This is an enforced separation, and you are the only individual who can bring us together. You can do this work. Will you do it? - meaning that he should go to the House of the Lord and there officiate for his parents who were dead, and by the ordinance of sealing bring them together and unite them in the family relation beyond the veil.
"Temple Manifestations" p. 77, 89, 131
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