Remarks

I should like to speak for the fathers and the mothers of the Church and in their behalf say to the young people of the Church: ¶

A MESSAGE TO THE YOUTH OF ZION ¶

Young men and young women, we believe in you; we have confidence in your integrity, and in the achievement of your high destiny. We support you, we love you. I believe if we could make the young people of the Church understand that, we should have gone a long way to hold them to the standards of the Church and to the keeping of the commandments which have occupied in their exposition, such a large portion of this conference. ¶

THE GREAT OBLIGATION OF PARENTS ¶

I was very grateful that President Grant was led in the course of his opening remarks to restate and reemphasize the great obligation of parents to their children; for it is that thing which seems to me, above all others, to claim our attention as a Church. We are depending upon the rising generation to carry forward this great and mighty work. Only a few years at best will serve to see the men whom you will sustain here today as the prophets and authorities of this great institution, pass to their honorable reward. The burdens of administration, the opportunities of leadership must, in natural sequence, pass to other and younger shoulders. So that, loving the work as we do, believing in its great accomplishments for the future, we must, of necessity, hold and claim these young people to carry it forward, to stand for and maintain God's work. ¶

I think they need at this time large sympathy from us. When I contemplate the environment in which they are placed, the unusual conditions surrounding them, my heart goes out to every one who must stand for honest manhood and resist untoward influences and maintain himself in accordance with the commandments of God and the standards of the Church. ¶

UNUSUAL EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCES THE YOUTH ¶

Do you contemplate the fact that the great educational forces surrounding the youth of today are most unusual, that in the major portion they did not exist a few decades ago? There were no moving pictures twenty or twenty-five years ago, and within that short space of time, that great enterprise which produces these pictures ¶

and distributes them all over the world for the education, mind you, of the people of the world, and the youth of the land in particular, has come to be, it is said, the fourth largest commercial enterprise in the world. Thousands and thousands every day are subjected to the influence and the education of these pictures. What that education is, you may judge for yourselves. What lessons are taught, you yourselves have seen, and that our young people should respond to those lessons is as natural as it is for flowers to grow in the sunshine, or for vegetation to die in the dark, depressing, poisonous atmosphere of a cellar. ¶

Many inventions and innovations of the past few years have also wrought their influences upon these boys and girls so susceptible to their environment. There has been the advent of the automobile, radios, new kinds and varieties of drama, of music, or that which is said to be music, all of which just as naturally and as inevitably influence and determine the emotions, and in a large respect, the actions of these boys and girls, as it is possible to do. A man can, only with the greatest of restraint and of force, take himself out of his environment and stand against the influences inserted against him in society. It is harder for young people than it is for adults to do that, because their natures are more susceptible and impressionable to the influences around about them. ¶

AN APPEAL TO PARENTS IN BEHALF OF THE YOUNG FOLKS ¶

In behalf of all these young folks up and down the Church, I would like to say to the parents of the Church: We claim your sympathy. We need your guiding hand, but we need your guidance expressed in terms of love and understanding. I feel that in many instances the young folks of the Church are not fully understood. I do not like to hear them berated, I do not like to hear it said that they have all gone wrong and that they are all going wrong. I do not believe it, because I believe that these young folks, by right have inherited, fundamentally, the faith of their fathers. They have inherited a disposition to serve God. That is the natural and logical sequence of the lives of the great pioneers of this country who came here to serve him and keep his commandments, and establish his great and mighty work. Therefore, I cannot think that in the main the young people of this Church are not the best, the most dependable, the most progressive and the finest young generation which the world, at least within the realm of history, has ever seen. ¶

Sometimes parents, out of a great desire to be helpful and to warn against danger and evil, assume an austerity that is forbidding to these young folks, and too often, much too often, there is a failure of that sympathetic understanding which makes a bond of union and love between parents and children than which there is no greater bulwark of safety for the young people of the Church. I appeal to every parent in this Church to understand his children. To understand them ¶

he must, to some extent at least, participate in their activities and recreation. He must delve into their inmost longings and cravings and aspirations. He must know the things that have appealed to them, and then discriminately, wisely, sympathetically, he shall guide them, guide them in the paths of truth and of righteousness. ¶

VISIONS OF WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY OF THE HOME ¶

What we need today is an interpretation of the gospel of Jesus Christ in terms of joyous living. The gospel is not, as many of our young folks think it to be, a hard, a joy-killing rule of life. I sometimes think that our young people are dissuaded from participation in the activities of the Church because there has never been given, to many of them at least, the great vision of the wonderful opportunity, the joys, the happiness, the services which are to be had within it. We need to let them know that for happiness, for supreme joy, for those permanent satisfactions that go to make life worth living, there is no course in life comparable to the course laid down by the blessed gospel of our Lord and our Savior. They do not all understand that. They do not all recognize the great joy to be had from participation within our Church institutions, and it is our great mission in the various institutions of the Church, and primarily in that greatest of all Church institutions, the home, to give that joyous conception of the principles of the gospel. ¶

THE GOSPEL A CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAM ¶

Our gospel is not a gospel of negation. It is true that we are commanded to eschew evil and to avoid many things which present themselves in forms of temptation, but our gospel is a positive uplifting, constructive program, making life happy if we will but subscribe to its tenets and live up to the commandments as they have been given to us. ¶

I think that the Christian church of the world has itself to blame for its failure in really teaching the gospel of Christ. It is largely because of the attitude taken by many of its leaders, whose longfaced piety and joy-killing aspect have never been pleasing to young people. It is said by the critics of Christ that, " Christ is the prophet of the weak; on the contrary, he came to give strength to the languishing, and to raise up those trodden under foot to be higher than kings. They say that his is the religion of the sick and of the dying, and yet he heals the sick and brings the sleeping to life. They say that he is against life, and yet he conquers death; that he is the God of sadness, and yet he exhorts his followers to be joyful and promises an everlasting banquet of joy to his friends. They say he introduced sadness and mortification into the world, and on the contrary when he was alive he ate and drank, and let his feet and hair be perfumed, and detested hypocritical fasts, and the penitential mummeries of vanity. Many have left Christ because they never knew him." ¶

OH, THAT BOYS AND GIRLS MIGHT KNOW JESUS CHRIST ¶

Oh, how I want our boys and girls to know Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of men! How I wish that they would recognize that he is their dearest and their greatest friend, that they may put their trust in him, knowing that he will never forsake them, and that a testimony of his divinity and his great work is the greatest influence that will ever come into their lives. ¶

Brethren and sisters, it is our mission and our duty to give them that testimony, for the enrichment of their souls, and for that salvation, for which we all labor and strive. God bless the youth of Zion, that they may accomplish their high and noble destiny in the purposes of the Lord, I pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. ¶