Remarks

Perhaps a word of personal mention this morning would be excusable. Under the rather unprecedented circumstances in which I am called to preside over this meeting, no doubt there are very many in the audience who are not acquainted with the presiding officer. I am William A. Hyde, of Pocatello. You have frequently heard of the town in Idaho, no doubt, and incidentally have heard of our connection as a stake with the Church; for we are all more or less connected and acquainted with the history of the Church in its various departments and organizations. ¶

I am relieved of some embarrassment this morning by the kindness of President Grant in asking that I should speak first. Otherwise, I should have been under the necessity of pushing myself forward into a place that otherwise I would not care to assume. I approach this duty and this opportunity with a great deal of pleasure, from the fact, that this honor has been given me, but nevertheless with apprehension that perhaps I may not be able to acquit myself with a degree of success that would be becoming. There are perhaps only two or three other presidents of stakes in the Church who are older in seniority than I am. I have now been laboring in the ministry, in this capacity, about twenty-five years, and, as I recall it, there are only two or three others who have been in the service longer. ¶

It would naturally be thought, I presume, and it would be the logic of the situation, that with service in the Church there should come a degree of wisdom and a degree of experience; in fact, that is what the Church requires of its men and of its women and expects of them. I come to you today representing a part of the Church which has as deep an interest in the growth of the whole as perhaps any other part of the Church, and is keenly alive, I believe, to the necessities that lie before this great work, and alive to the ends of our heavenly Father, with respect to us. Never have I had the opportunity thus of confronting an audience with this responsibility, but I feel that it is a part of my duty to turn my mind with full earnestness of purpose to make this meeting in harmony with the grand meetings of this conference and those which no doubt will ensue. ¶

There are experiences in the lives of all men, no doubt, that have made great impressions upon their minds. Some of them come to us early in life. I recall one now through which I passed in the early days of my ministry that has been of great value to me; in fact, has been one of the leading things that has happened in the course of my association with the Church. I remember that in company with one of my companions I started upon a long journey to go over the top of the mountain into an adjoining valley for the purpose of a certain investigation. Those of you who have lived in country districts and have made journeys of this character will well understand now what I am about to say. We began our journey up one of those long, apparently interminable trails that are characteristic of our mountains, passing the familiar grades and varieties of willows and brush until we came, at last, to the evidences that pointed to the fact that we were near the top of the mountain -- the sparsely growing quaking aspen trees and other evidences showing ¶

that we were near the summit, when suddenly there came upon our view a most unlooked for landscape. It seems that the Creator had in some way hollowed out a miniature amphitheatre in the tops of the hills, a bowl, a round valley, the edges of it fringed with pine trees. In the bottom of this little valley was a little stream of water that percolated through a tiny meadow. There were no evidences of any habitation there except a small log house, with its accompanying outbuildings, around which could be seen a few of the ordinary cattle that men in farming communities usually have. ¶

As I saw this rather unusual landscape, the thought occurred to me, " What can this man see?"I learned subsequently that, at periodical times, he went over the rim of the valley down to the nearby station to get his mail, but otherwise he was shut out from the world; he was in a way a recluse, he was what you might term a hermit. He lived his life alone in the tops of the mountains, surrounded only by his few stock and the other little evidences of life, and perhaps they had a small family. When he stood out at his door at night he could see only about half of the firmament. The stars that deck the sky for you and me who live upon the plain were not observable by him. Perhaps no more than one half of the course of the sun could he ever see, and the great throbbing world around and about him never was observed by him except upon isolated occasions. And I thought, " How like man in general, in his attitude toward life and education, and the things that are best in the world, is this man who is thus isolated in the top of the mountain!" ¶

And from that I drew a lesson which has been a valuable one all the days of my life. It has been a lesson that has taught me the value of a greater outlook and view of things, of a broader perspective of life, and of the things with which we are surrounded and which go to make up our present life and that eventually will make up our future existence. I have seen men worldly wise and all-sufficient in their own estimation, who, like this man, though unlike him in a way but like him in this, surrounded by their wall of self-sufficiency, so that they have not been able to look out upon the vast acts and purposes and opportunities of men but have been limited to their own narrow conclusions, based upon their self-sufficient philosophy, and I have thought, " How inadequate are these men for all work of life, how insufficient are they for the things that our Father in heaven requires of them." ¶

Upon the other hand I have seen men in humble situations who have stood upon the mountain top and from their elevated pinnacle have viewed the varied course of events, and it seems to me sometimes have been able to look down to the great finale of things. I have thought with relation to this lesson that the Prophet Joseph Smith, from his outlook and from the standpoint from which he viewed matters, knew more about the planets, the firmament, the great heaven ¶

of heavens than you and I know about the little potato patch that we cultivate in our back garden. ¶

And I have from it drawn many a lesson that has been of comfort and of value to me in my ministry among the people. I have drawn from it the lesson of the value of perspective, the ability to see and to place together things in their proper relations as to distance and as to size and as to importance. I have learned that one who from proper distances may view the scenes of events, to him the scars, the crudities of life, the things that wound and hurt, are lost in the general view, just as one looks down upon the valley from the top of one of these hills, where now there may be gullies and crude formations of earth, and may see the plain one vast carpet, as of some vast Axminster rug spread out beneath the sun. Distance takes from us the sting and the hurt of things, and gives us a better view of the proper relation and quality of men and their actions. ¶

And from it I have drawn this conclusion, that we are too near to our men today to properly understand the fine motives that actuate them. I believe that one hundred years from now we may look back upon this time in which we are now living, and some historian may say with full confidence, and with just as much authority as any historian who has ever written, that in this day in which we now live certain men spoke and directed, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Then from that distance we may see and recognize the prophetic word and the prophet, just as well as we now recognize the prophet of olden times. And men who stand in our midst today and who have stood among us, who by reason of our very nearness, and of our close association with them, have lost in a degree that certain sacredness of character which attaches to a prophet -- that having been removed by time -- we may classify them among the prophets of whom ancient history speaks. Even now at this time there is one enshrined just so in the minds of the Latter-day Saints. He is removed from us by a hundred years, or nearly so, and today he has assumed a new form and aspect in life and he has become to us just as surely and as certainly a prophet of the Lord as ever any man that lived to whom that title has been given. ¶

And so, let me assure you, my brethren and sisters, and especially my young friends who may be listening to me today, these men who now stand among us are invested with that authority that empowers them to speak the word of God and speak with just the same convincing force as did any man who ever lived upon the earth who presumed to speak in the name of our heavenly Father. And so I have learned from these things the value of perspective, the right way to look at things, the way to disassociate ourselves from the nearness of the present, and to see men as if they were afar off, and under the influence that time always casts upon men. ¶

I have learned this also, the value of patience. Events fly so swiftly by us that they are not seen in their proper relation. We ¶

little understand the movement of time. It takes time to bring to pass the fruition of God's purposes. Not always are the combinations seen in a few years, in a generation even. Men and women plod out their slow lives in their menial duties, and in the offices and callings that come to mortality, sometimes fretting and sometimes wondering if God will never justify their sacrifices; but lo, and behold, a generation passes; their sons follow them and their sons' sons stand in their stead; and lo, the work of the Lord has been accomplished in the thing that they hitherto had undertaken! A pioneer goes into a far distant country. In travail, trouble, poverty and distress, he plows the ground, sows and reaps, and sees the fruitage gone year after year, perhaps, but finally the culmination comes, where a temple is reared upon the very place he first set his foot, and the land blossoms under the blessing of the Almighty. He was the beginning of it, the one who spread the way and who opened up the means for the accomplishment of the thing that ultimately the Lord, our heavenly Father, gave to him and to his succeeding generations. ¶

And so, I have learned the lessons of patience, and in my ministry I have occasion, time and again, to say to people, " We are like the waves of the sea; now we are upon the crest of success, and again we are down in the troughs of the ocean; have patience, my friends, the time will come when your bark will be lifted upon the crest again, and you will see out upon the broad expanse of waters." How applicable this lesson may be to those who are in distress, at the present day, I think we may well consider. ¶

We have been passing through times of intense commercial travail and trouble. Many and many are the good men and good women who have been down in the very bottom of despondency, due to these unusual conditions through which we have passed. Nevertheless, by a proper understanding of God's purposes, and by a proper estimation of our strength, we may hold out firmly to the end, until these things shall have passed and prosperity shall again come to us. Thus I know that the Lord decrees that men shall have patience; that they shall endure; that it is not his purpose that in any man or any generation of men shall all things be culminated; but that we, following one after another in the line of our activities and of our peopling of the earth, constitute the grand whole of which God's plan is made. We today are contributing to the success of tomorrow; and, throughout the Church of Christ, there should run the element of patience and of faith, in the thought that eventually there will come success to all those who sincerely trust in him, and patiently abide the day of his vindication. ¶

Speaking of the attitude which men assume and from which they may view, I had a rather unusual experience this morning that fits in nicely with the theme that I have undertaken. Coming down the street, I passed a man whom I have known for years, a poor old cripple, who must be now seventy-five years of age, who dragged ¶

one foot slowly behind the other, in evident pain as he traveled, but nevertheless with a contented look upon, his face, (his good old wife with her arm in his, helping him along the sidewalk. And just after I had bade them good morning, and had passed my salutation with him as an old friend whom I had known formerly in the stake over which I preside, he called to me and said, " Brother Hyde, do you know about my genealogy?" Why no, I did not know about it. Said he, " We have the names of ten thousand people, and we have done the work for four thousand of them." And then there was a happy look of anticipation upon his face. I thought I could see the unuttered thought in his mind, " What a joy and pleasure it will be to do the work for the other six thousand of them." And, as I turned from him, I thought, " This man with his dragging foot, drawn in pain along the sidewalk, is far above the ordinary man, he is lifted upon the wings of the spirit, that has taken him above the mountain top. He looks down upon us, I think, from his lofty station, perhaps with a degree of pity -- upon those who do not see as he does." And I thought, " How glorious is this work of the Latter-day Saints! How superior their thought, in a way, to the wisdom of men! How broad and expansive are their conceptions of the almighty purposes of our heavenly Father! They are not recluses; they are not hermits; from the standpoint to which God has led them by his revelations, they look forth upon the work which comprises and embraces not only the scheme of mortality, but all the vast concourse of the sons of men from the beginning of time." ¶

And so, my brethren and sisters, let us take these lessons from these observations which you, no doubt, have seen as I have seen and recounted, to have patience, and faith, and to seek to come out from the narrow limits of our own self-sufficiency, to emerge from that species of confidence which sometimes comes to the Latter-day Saint and makes him think that he and his people are all there are who are associated in the work of the Lord. I like to take the broader view, that God, through men, is working out his purposes, and that he is bringing to pass, from all directions and from all sources, the things that will contribute to the glory of his name; and that inventors, poets, and workers in all lines of thought are doing perhaps unconsciously the very thing that God would have them do. So, with faith thus pitched and attuned to the purposes of the Almighty, let us go forward with full purpose of heart, to serve him and keep the commandments, in faith, believing, and with vision seeing the wonderful things that God has in store for his people. ¶

May his Spirit be in the minds and hearts of the Latter-day Saints and spur them on to renewed activity and faith in this great and glorious work which has been given to us to accomplish in these the last days. This is my prayer in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. ¶