My brothers and sisters: Those whom I see and those who are viewing listening whom I do not see, I stand before you with gratitude that I have been present today and heard the great messages that have been delivered. While my own personal feelings are of no consequence, I had really contemplated doing little more than bearing my testimony, but our President has seen fit to change somewhat the program that I understood was to be followed, and so I face you with his expression that I occupy more of your time. I have been greatly impressed with the President's message and particularly that part of it which dealt with the home and with what I might call discipline in the home. Discipline is not a rod. It is love, kindness, consideration, and understanding.

We are blessed that there come to us, we invite them to our homes, spirits from the other world. As they thus come at our invitation they impose upon us an obligation which, in one sense, a true sense, is divine. So entrusted to our care is a spirit created by the Father who comes here pursuant to the great plan which was devised before the foundations of the world were laid. Bound up in that plan is not alone the past before we came, but the present, while we are here, and the future, the eternities that are to come, and we shall not escape responsibility if in any way we fall short of that mission which we assumed when we brought into this world that little, pure, holy spirit to be guided and directed by us.

Generations ago the Psalmist sang: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

"For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour"  Ps. 8:4-5

The Psalmist must have had in mind and was perhaps referring to the great announcement made in the opening of the sacred record, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"  Gen. 1:27

In those statements, in that declaration, pregnant with meaning, is bound up the whole plan of life and salvation, our existence before we came, our existence here, and our existence hereafter. Go created us spiritually. He created the bodies through whom, down through the ages he has provided tabernacles, temples for those spirits which he had created. He brought us here, offsprings of his love, tabernacled with his hopes and his prayers, that we would go forward and live through our existence here in accordance with his will, that we might then, passing on, reach the high destiny which he had planned for us.

That we might never be in a position from the very first, that we might not know what he wished us to do, he gave the gospel from the very beginning that men might know his ways, know what they had to do in they that might fulfil their measure of creation and reach that high destiny he had provided.

It is my faith, and I believe history will bear me out, that there never has been a time in the history of the world, in the darkest hours of paganism when men did not have in their possession so much of the truth, and more, as they were able to live. Sometimes that truth was besmirched, sometimes it was dimmed, sometimes it was distorted, but down underneath it all always were some elemental truths, because men had in their minds at least the traditions of the gospel preached from the beginning, had in their minds certain fundamental things which concerned their salvation.

God has made it clear, as I understand it, that he holds his children responsible for the truth which he reveals to them, and if they are not in a position to live all the truth, they are in the position to live that which he gives. Pushing it, perhaps to the extreme, we know that from the beginning, God taught as part of the gospel the mission, the life, the work, the death of his Only Begotten Son, who was to atone for the bringing upon us of mortality.

You know, I can see underneath the sacrifices that were offered, the human sacrifices, in the country to the south of us among the Lamanites, sacrifices that finally led to cannibalism, the eating of a part of the sacrifice—I see a clear suggestion of the sacrifice distorted almost beyond recognition, which God was to make and made through his Only Begotten Son for our redemption.

We ought to remember, I feel always, the truths which God has given to us. We live in revolutionary and evolutionary time. The Lord has vouchsafed to us some of the greatest discoveries of all times; he has increased beyond the wildest dreams of the most imaginative poet, our powers of transmission of speech. He has increased our powers of speed of transportation. He has discovered to us great secrets of energy which we know how to create but not yet how to control.

We have looked at these things, and we have said in our hearts, and in our speech, that the old has been "outmoded." We see the results, and we believe. But it has been rather an easy transition from the outmoding of these material instrumentalities given by God for our good (and we shall yet use them for the promulgation of truth though not yet do I catch a glimpse even of how in all cases they shall be used, but yet they will be so used)—it has been an easy transition, I say, to affirm that since the physical has become outmoded, so is "outmoded" the moral and the spiritual of the past. In the darkness they are crying out, as we have heard, for a prophet. Brother Romney said that what they need is a listening ear for the prophet they have.

But it is wholly fantastic, as I see it, for us to think that man himself is "outmoded," or his moral and spiritual past. We still have the five senses, all we learn and know and experience comes through those five senses. Man has not been given another sense by these great discoveries. Man still thinks as he has always thought, more poignantly, perhaps, more deeply in certain lines than heretofore, but he still thinks, he still speaks, he is still guided by the same great passions of love, hate, ambition, desire to serve the Lord and all the rest of it. We have not changed. We are as God made us originally, save as we have somehow in some things subverted our feelings, our passions, our urges, our ambitions.

What I would like to get to you today is my feeling that the spiritual in man, the spirit of man is in no sense whatever "outmoded." He stands today as he stood when he came from the garden. God is still God; Jesus is the Christ. There is no change in that. There has been no change in the great spiritual truths that are essential to our progress spiritually and to our eventual salvation and exaltation. Nothing is changed there.

Moreover, we of this Church have our testimony and our knowledge that God still speaks to us, that he does not permit us to wander in darkness and in silence, uninstructed, uninspired, without revelation. No principle of the gospel is more glorious than that principle of continuous revelation because we know that so often as it is necessary our Heavenly Father will again reveal to us all that it is necessary that we should know, in addition to what we now have.

We are not moving blindly, we are not moving by the maxims of the past only. We are not moving alone, guided only by the revelations given in ancient times. We are moving forward under revelations given in modern times and are moving forward under a knowledge that if we need further light, it shall be given to us.

My brothers and sisters, I leave with you my testimony that God lives, that the eternal truths are today as they have always been, no change, that God expects us to keep his commandments. I give you my testimony that this is the Restored Gospel, that Joseph is a Prophet, that the First Vision was a reality, that the man who now stands as the President of the Church possesses all the keys and powers that were possessed by the Prophet Joseph, that God expects us, as has been said here today, to keep all of his commandments to the end that we may be saved and exalted in his presence, and for this I humbly pray, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.