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( C O N T I N U E D )
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Wandle Mace recorded his own experience of trying to keep his family safe from sickness and evil while living in nearby Lee County, Iowa. The sickness began with a son, John. The bedridden child regularly sought his father for “the ordinance of laying on of hands,” but it proved to be only a temporary fix. The blessing would pacify him for only “a short time, then he would again be in great distress.” After several days, Mace “became weary and despondent in spirit” at his inability to heal his son. He called for “Brother Whitney,” a neighbor to “assist me [and] together we laid our hands on his head, and Brother Whitney offered up prayer in his behalf.”[1]
While Whitney prayed, “a sinking, death like feeling came over me; and it was with the greatest exertion that I was enabled to keep my hands upon his head. I feared to take them off least a bad affect might follow.” The administration was again only effective for a brief period, before it seemed to exacerbate the situation. As the evening progressed, the ailment spread throughout the Mace and Whitney households. The two men spent the entire night blessing family members until “we ourselves became very much depressed in spirit, there was something unusual the matter, but what we did not know.”[2]
Their confusion would be resolved the following day when the pair “began to realize the true situation,” that they were dealing with an evil intelligence as evident from the behavior of his wife, Margaret. Before revealing that she had become the apparent victim of possession, Mace clarified that she had become afflicted by no fault of her own:
My wife had been indefatigable in nursing her sick children and had bourne [sic] up bravely until now. It was a new experience to be thus baffled by the powers of darkness, that such was the case was manifest in the condition of my wife, who was a firm believer in the Gospel, she had borne unflinchingly every trial she had been called to pass through; she had all confidence in the ordinance of the Holy Priesthood for the healing of the sick it was possible to have; but now worn out by anxiety and weak in body, she seemed unable longer to resist the evil influence surrounding her.[3]
Mace worried that his audience would assume that there was a flaw in Margaret’s character. It was long held that demonic agencies must find a means to possess their victim whether through grave sins or doubt. Yet, it was not her doubts or deeds that had offered the evil spirit entrance into her body. Instead she had become susceptible to demonic possession as a result of physical and psychological exhaustion from enduring hardships, self-sacrifice, and caring for others.
Although Mace recalled that ordinarily his wife, like his son, would have turned to those who held the Church’s priesthood, presumably her husband, for blessings when she was sick, on this occasion, she rebuffed her husband’s attempts at faith healing. Mace recalled, “as we approached her & laid our hands on her head she resisted, the Devil manifesting himself through her defied us saying, we had no power to cast it out.” Sister Mace or the evil spirit within her re-enacted the scene from Acts 19, in which demons questioned their would-be exorcists’ authority to expel them from their victim’s body.
Mace paced the floor, as he became “convinced that all our troubles arose from the influence of the powers of darkness.” He urged Whitney to follow him out of the house to take refuge in “a secluded spot in the timber.” There in prayer they sought the divine for “power to cast out those unclean spirits, and devils that were distressing our families.”[4] When they returned, they found Margaret with her symptoms progressively becoming more severe: “Her face almost a scarlet from the fever, and in her eyes a terrible brightness.” Her words and actions remained “as defiant as before.”[5]
Mace and Whitney laid their hands on her head and now took on the evil spirits directly. They cast out the demons “by all the power we held by virtue of the Priesthood of the Son of God, we rebuked the devil and every evil spirit and power in the name of Jesus Christ.” Margaret fainted as the pair lifted their hands from her head. Once she was revived, Mace described her as “almost lifeless but in her right mind.” Mace and Whitney “then went through the families, Bro Whitney & mine, & laid our hands upon every member & we rebuked the devil in the name of Jesus Christ & commanded it to depart from the house & trouble us no more.” Mace recalled that their “prayers was answered, We praised God who delivered us from so great affliction.”[6] As for his wife, she “recovered and we were disturbed no more.”[7]
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