Machiventa Melchizedek

93:7.1Mel­chiz­e­dek con­tin­ued for some years to in­struct his stu­dents and to train the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies, who pen­e­trated to all the sur­round­ing tribes, es­pe­cially to Egypt, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Asia Mi­nor. And as the decades passed, these teach­ers jour­neyed far­ther and far­ther from Salem, car­ry­ing with them Ma­chi­venta’s gospel of be­lief and faith in God.

93:7.2The de­scen­dants of Adam­son, clus­tered about the shores of the lake of Van, were will­ing lis­ten­ers to the Hit­tite teach­ers of the Salem cult. From this one­time And­ite cen­ter, teach­ers were dis­patched to the re­mote re­gions of both Eu­rope and Asia. Salem mis­sion­ar­ies pen­e­trated all Eu­rope, even to the British Isles. One group went by way of the Faroes to the An­don­ites of Ice­land, while an­other tra­versed China and reached the Japanese of the east­ern is­lands. The lives and ex­pe­ri­ences of the men and women who ven­tured forth from Salem, Mes­o­po­ta­mia, and Lake Van to en­lighten the tribes of the East­ern Hemi­sphere pre­sent a heroic chap­ter in the an­nals of the hu­man race.

93:7.3But the task was so great and the tribes were so back­ward that the re­sults were vague and in­def­i­nite. From one gen­er­a­tion to an­other the Salem gospel found lodg­ment here and there, but ex­cept in Pales­tine, never was the idea of one God able to claim the con­tin­ued al­le­giance of a whole tribe or race. Long be­fore the com­ing of Je­sus the teach­ings of the early Salem mis­sion­ar­ies had be­come gen­er­ally sub­merged in the older and more uni­ver­sal su­per­sti­tions and be­liefs. The orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel had been al­most wholly ab­sorbed in the be­liefs in the Great Mother, the Sun, and other an­cient cults.

93:7.4You who to­day en­joy the ad­van­tages of the art of print­ing lit­tle un­der­stand how dif­fi­cult it was to per­pet­u­ate truth dur­ing these ear­lier times; how easy it was to lose sight of a new doc­trine from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other. There was al­ways a ten­dency for the new doc­trine to be­come ab­sorbed into the older body of re­li­gious teach­ing and mag­i­cal prac­tice. A new rev­e­la­tion is al­ways con­tam­i­nated by the older evo­lu­tion­ary be­liefs.