Bruce R. McConkie wrote. . .
Once or twice in a thousand years—perhaps a dozen times since mortal man became of dust a living soul—an event of such transcendent import occurs that neither heaven nor earth are ever thereafter the same.
Once or twice in a score of generations the hand from heaven clasps the hand on earth in perfect fellowship, the divine drama unfolds, and the whole course of mortal events changes.
Now and then in a quiet garden, or amid the fires and thunders of Sinai, or inside a sepulcher that cannot be sealed, or in an upper room—almost always apart from the gaze of men—and seldom known to more than a handful of people—the Lord intervenes in the affairs of men and manifests his will relative to their salvation. . . .
The most transcendent of all such events occurred in a garden called Gethsemane, outside Jerusalem’s walls, when the Chief Citizen of planet earth sweat great drops of blood from every pore as he in agony took upon himself the sins of all men on conditions of repentance. Yet another of these events, destined to affect the life and being of every living soul, happened in the Arimathean’s tomb when the sinless spirit of the one perfect man returned from the paradise of God to inhabit—this time in the glorious immortality—the pierced and slain body that once was his. ~Bruce R. McConkie, The Gift of the Atonement (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2002) 63
