Preaching on Custom House Steps
An imposing building, the Custom House on Donegall Quay was constructed in the late 1850s, to house officials who were dealing with goods being shipped to and from Belfast port, in what is now known as the Cathedral Quarter.
It has housed a variety of government departments over the years. But, in the late nineteenth century, missionaries from the Church frequently held meetings and preached the principles of the restored gospel on its steps.
After more than twenty years of missionaries being assigned to Ireland, elders Robert Marshall and George Wilson arrived in Belfast in May 1884. This was the beginning of a new and productive era for the preaching of the gospel in the Emerald Isle.
A series of letters published in the Millennial Star tracked the progress of the missionary work in and around Belfast. In the summer of 1884 Elder George Wilson wrote from there:
“Since my arrival I have been endeavouring to get an opening among the people, and have been able in a small degree to do so, but this is a thing pretty hard to accomplish. Through faith and perseverance, however, I hope to plant the standard of Zion in my native land, for I feel assured there are many honest people here, who will yet rejoice in the glorious light of truth. ... The Custom House is the general place we hold meetings in, and thus far we have encountered but little opposition, for which I feel to thank the Lord.”1
At that time, George Wilson and Robert Marshall were the only two missionaries in Ireland. By October 1884, when John Henry Smith (European Mission president) visited the area, there were twenty-nine local members. A branch was organised with William Cavanagh as president.
The work evidently moved on despite opposition, as the branch grew to sixty members by April 1885.
By May 1887, it had become impossible to rent a hall for meetings, there being too much ill-feeling against the missionaries. However, with the season for outdoor preaching beginning, the missionaries were again preaching on the Custom House steps.
These missionaries were all part of the work of salvation in Ireland during the later years of the nineteenth century. Despite opposition, many were baptised, and then joined the main body of the Church in the U.S., in order to escape that opposition. George Wilson was no doubt expressing all the missionaries’ feelings when he declared:
“There is no labor so inviting as that of saving souls. There is a comfort in laboring among Saints but a thousand times more among strangers, for every faculty of the mind is brought into operation. We are also left to depend upon the promises of the Lord, and by faith prove Him true to His word, which gives us confidence in the hour of adversity, when there is no other power to save.”2
Sources
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Ireland since 1840. Brent A. Barlow, MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1968. Online at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4503/
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Ireland 1840-2004. Gertrude E. Boyd. Unpublished dissertation, Stranmillis College, Queen’s University Belfast, 2004.