President Smith first announced me as Matthias F. Cowley. He has been dead for a number of years, but nothing would please me more than to have him speak through me at this time. I only wish that I were as well prepared to propound the scriptures and explain the gospel after my many years in the missionary service as my father was at the age of nineteen when he first went to the Southern States, at which time he knew by heart four hundred eighty-three passages of scripture.

I am very grateful to be at this great conference today. I am grateful for the privilege I have to engage in the missionary service in this Church wherever the call may take me.

VISIT TO THE LEPER SAINTS

A week ago yesterday I was in a little settlement known as Kaulapapa on the Island of Molokai in the Hawaiian group. That is a leper settlement. I flew over there to spend an afternoon with our leper Saints. It was my first experience with those people. I went expecting and apprehending that I would be depressed. I left there knowing that I had been exalted. I attended a service with those people. I heard a chorus sing our beautiful anthem, conducted by an aged man, blinded by the dread disease. I heard them sing, "We Thank Thee. O God, for a Prophet," and as long as I live, that song will never ring in my soul with such beautiful harmony as came from the hearts and the voices of those emaciated lepers of that colony.

PRESENT DAY PIONEERS

When I heard the brethren from Europe speak this morning, my heart went out to the people who live in those countries. We are here today paying tribute to the great pioneers who came here a hundred years ago to make this desert blossom as the rose  Isa. 35:1 I have often wondered if we still had great pioneers in this great Church, as great as those who came here a hundred years ago. After hearing the two brethren from Europe this morning, I am reassured. We have just as great pioneers living today in this Church as we had one hundred years ago. When we think of those who pioneered through the great war years of Europe, who have suffered the horror and the devastation of their homes and cities, but who have pioneered through all those experiences faithfully and devotedly to the gospel of Jesus Christ without such leadership as our pioneers had when they came to this desert wasteland, I say we still have as great pioneers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as we ever had.

FASTING AND FAST OFFERINGS

I have a message for you, my brothers and sisters. It is based upon one of the things that was referred to in the statistics this morning, and I offer this message in connection with our people in the war-torn areas of Europe who suffer: That message has to do with fast offerings. We heard it read here that our death rate is very, very low. If we are honest in the payments of fast offerings, we are living miracles. We are not obeying the principle of the fast, and it is a principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are not paying to the Lord and to the Saints in Europe who have neither bedding nor clothing nor food, that which God expects us to pay. We are paying less, I suppose, than ten cents a month in fast offering. Does that represent the cost of the food we are eating or that we are refraining from eating on fast day? All you have to do is take one look at me and know that I know that I owe more than a dollar a month fast offering to this Church, and yet it was announced here that we had not reached our goal. What is it, one dollar a year? I don't know. The goal is, brothers and sisters, an honest offering for that which we refrain from eating in accordance with the plan of God on the first Sabbath of each month.

We cannot appreciate the suffering, the wants of our brothers and sisters in the countries of Europe unless we fast and fast often, and we need to fast! The great pioneers who came here were fasting pioneers. They were not men and women of financial means. This building, the great building east of here, all of this temple block was built, not with money, but with faith, with privation, and the foundation of it all is righteousness, good character, initiative, independence, self-reliance. If we are building upon the foundation which our pioneer fathers laid for us here, we will not build better buildings; we will build better characters. I know that this is the greatest force in all the world to develop character, to bring righteousness into the lives of men and women. Christ said, "Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin"  John 8:34 and when man becomes the servant of sin, he loses his freedom. Men who drink say they have the right to drink, that is their freedom, but too often they lose that freedom by becoming the servant of drink and not the master of it. Our freedom, brothers and sisters, is the freedom which our pioneers brought here, the freedom to do what God wants us to do and what we ought to do, rather than what we ourselves desire and are pleased to do, and it is our responsibility to hold high that great torch of freedom founded upon righteousness which those great parents of yours and of mine carried here into this valley.

Now, in conclusion, may I say that we are all here in fulfilment of the promise of God through his prophets, that in the last days would the mountain of the Lord's house be established in the tops of the mountains and be exalted above the hills and that all nations would flow unto it  Isa. 2:2-3 We are all here today in fulfilment of that prophecy, and yet throughout the world we have thousands of Latter-day Saints, in Germany, Scandinavia, in the islands of the sea, who have a burning desire in their hearts to fulfil that same prophecy just as you and I have fulfilled it, and their eyes are looking up, and their hopes are reaching out to the tops of the mountains, and the only way we have of bringing them here to us is by reaching out to them where they are and seeing that they do not suffer, that they do not want for food, that they do not want for clothing.

We came here to these valleys to be sustained on the foundations of this Church. We must extend now into all the world the same sustenance which we have received here. Pay your fast offerings, obey the principles of the welfare plan, and let us take the mountain of the Lord's house and all its gifts and blessings to the four corners of the earth, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.