Later Years
From 1922 to 1927, Roberts was appointed president of the Eastern States Mission, and there he created an innovative "mission school" to teach LDS missionaries the most effective ways to proselytize. In 1923 Roberts, suffering from diabetes, collapsed at a conference "commemorating the Centennial anniversary of the revealed existence of the Book of Mormon." He was treated with the relatively new drug insulin. A year after the death of his third wife, his companion in New York, Roberts returned to Utah where he became president of the First Council of Seventy. Roberts died on 27 September 1933 from complications of diabetes. He was survived by thirteen children and by his second wife.
Regardless of his ultimate religious beliefs, most scholars would accept the judgment of Brigham Madsen that Roberts possessed a "deeply embedded integrity, and above all...fearless willingness to follow wherever his reason led him. He could be abrasive in his defense of stubbornly held beliefs, but he had the capacity to change his views when confronted with new and persuasive evidence." To Leonard J. Arrington, Roberts was "the intellectual leader of the Mormon people in the era of Mormonism's finest intellectual attainment."
Read more about this topic: B. H. Roberts
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