Mormon Doctrine, McConkie, p. 639; History of the Church, Smith, 4:425
“One hot afternoon in the tropics, I stood before a zone conference of missionaries. I was telling them that missionaries should so conduct themselves and be so spiritually prepared in their way of teaching and be such perfect gentlemen and ladies that the investigators and members would actually see them as ‘angels.’ … In fact, angel means ‘messenger’ in Hebrew (malak). I quoted from Moroni 7:29… . My eyes darted across the column to verse 31 and it glowed—it jumped out at me. So I read it as well and, while I was reading it out loud to the missionaries, I saw it as a new writing with a new meaning… . It says: ‘The office of their ministry [the ministry of angels] is to call men unto repentance, and to fulfil and to do the work of the covenants of the Father, … to prepare the way among the children of men, by declaring the word of Christ unto the chosen vessels of the Lord.’ It was made clear to me at that moment that angels and missionaries do the very same work—the very same things… . In other words, no wonder some special, elect people are so in tune with the Spirit that they see the missionaries as angels. They see only the missionaries, but they feel angels present, so they believe the missionaries to be angels, too.” (Robert E. Wells, Doctrines of the Book of Mormon, 1991 Sperry Symposium, pp. 14-15)