Mormon Musings

Study the Scriptures. They offer one of the best sources we have to keep in touch with the Spirit of the Lord. One of the ways I have gained my sure knowledge that Jesus is the Christ is through my study of the Scriptures.  (Elder Ballard, Ensign, May 1987, 15)

All who would understand the things of God must understand them by the Spirit of God. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses  8:115

You may know whether you are led right or wrong, as well as you know the way home ; for every principle God has revealed carries its own convictions of its truth to the human mind, and there is no calling of God to man on earth but what brings with it the evidence of its authenticity. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 9:149

Many are disposed through their own wickedness "to do as I damned please"--and they are damned. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 11:254

Those who think that they can succeed without praying, try it, and I will promise them eternal destruction, if they persist in that course. Some think that they can prosper by lying a little, breaking the Sabbath, and doing almost everything that they ought not to do. In the end they will learn that they have trod the path that leads to the first and second death, which will have power over them; and the time will come when they will be as though they had not been. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 7:205

“One man has said that 'hell is being frozen in self-pity.'  Indeed, at times when we think our lot is hard or when we feel ourselves misunderstood, it will be so easy for us to indulge ourselves in feeling some self-pity.  A contrasting episode comes to us out of ancient Greece: several hundred Spartans were holding the pass at Thermopylae, that narrow pass, and the Persians came in overwhelming numbers and urged the Spartans to surrender.  Hoping to intimidate them further, the Persians sent emissaries to the Spartans, saying they had so many archers in their army they could darken the sky with their arrows. The Spartans said, 'So much the better. We shall fight in the shade.'   Now, brothers and sisters, the disciple has to be ready to fight in the shade of circumstance.  One of the ways we can have perspective that will permit us to fight in the shade of circumstances is to read the scriptures and have involvement—intellectually and spiritually—with the case studi

I should like, if I may, to share with you on this point the fine writing of your own A. Lester Allen, a dean and scientist on this campus. This is what I have come to call the "Allen Analogy" about time. Let me read you these lines, if I may. Their application will be obvious. Dean Allen writes: Suppose, for instance, that we imagine a "being" moving onto our earth whose entire life-span is only 1/100 of a second. Ten thousand "years" for him, generation after generation, would be only one second of our time. Suppose this imaginary being comes up to a quiet pond in the forest where you are seated. You have just tossed in a rock and are watching the ripples. A leaf is fluttering from the sky and a bird is swooping over the water. He would find everything absolutely motionless. Looking at you, he would say: "In all recorded history nothing has changed. My father and his father before him have seen that everything is absolutely still. This creatur