Almost every day we hear it said, or read it, that we are living in a changing world. I don't believe many of the people who use that phrase have any very clear idea about what they mean by it. It sounds good, seeming to imply a penetrating insight into the portent of the times, no matter how nebulous or muddy the thinking behind it may be, so it is freely used.

But I don't want to talk about that. A companion phrase is that we can't go back—we'll never go back to things as they were before. Well, the man who finds himself finally hanged on the gallows is the man who, when he got started off wrong, wouldn't go back. My judgment is that when we get started on the wrong way the sooner we turn back the better. The whole doctrine of repentance assumes a turning back from wrong to right.

But I don't want to go into that, either. I merely want to remind you that, amid all the changes in an ever-changing world there are some immutable things which do not change. They are as steadfast and unchanging as the heavens, which are the same now as when the first man looked out upon them. They are the basis of the moral order of the world which is the foundation upon which our civilization itself is built. The task of today is to preserve, though all else change, man's allegiance, unshaken, to those eternal foundations.

The Ten Commandments  Ex. 20:3-17 for instance. They cannot be abrogated without abrogating the moral order of the world, shaking down the very foundations upon which our civilization rests. They set forth the law of life and can never be outmoded or rendered obsolete while life endures. They are of just as much binding force today as they were on the day when they were spoken with the voice of thunder out of the clouds on Sinai. They can no more be violated without disastrous consequences than one can violate any law governing in the physical world without being visited with the inescapable penalty.

As I listened to the powerful message of the Presidency, delivered this morning, I was impressed with the importance of that idea. From that message, if we were attentive to it, we learned that as to basic things there is no middle ground. Either we live by them or we pay the penalty of departure from their inexorable commands. They are not subject to modification or interpretation, but stand wholly as given, to be accepted in whole and lived completely.

It is the same with the basic things upon which we have rested our faith. Either a thing is, or it is not. To illustrate: This Church is founded upon the proposition that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that through His mediation it became possible for us to attain immortality and eternal life. We cannot deviate from that. He is the Son of the Living God, the author of our salvation  Heb. 5:9 and must be accepted in that light solely and completely. The whole structure of our own Church revolves about that basic fact. We say that the God of heaven came down in answer to the prayer of a boy and that He brought with Him a personage whom He introduced as His son, and He commanded that praying boy to hear His Son  JS—H 1:17 And out of the teachings which were then given, and followed up by subsequent instructions, this Church was established. Now, that admits of no explanation, of no modification. Either those things happened or they did not happen. There is no middle ground; and if they did not happen then we have nothing, because our whole structure is foundationed upon that assumed fact. We accept it as a fact, and we may not temporize with it, try to explain it away, modify it, or liberalize about it. It stands as the basic thing upon which our whole faith is founded. And our whole system of belief exacts of us that we accept those basic truths, without modification or change. As with the moral order of the world so those things may not be changed. They are as binding today as when they were first declared by the voice of God out of the heavens, and they will never change.

May God grant that we may hold steadfastly to them and that we may order our lives so that we shall not find occasions to depart from them, I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.