The Fundamentals of the Gospel

Brethren and Sisters: ¶

Conferences of this kind are primarily for members of the Church, but nonmembers are welcome to attend the public sessions and of course to listen to the broadcast proceedings. However, it is to members that most of us who speak direct our remarks. This I shall do during the few minutes I occupy. ¶

A Practical Religion ¶

We teach that our religion is a very practical one and, being a way of life, touches every phase of our daily living. We believe with the Apostle James that faith without works is dead. We also believe with the Apostle Paul that "... by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Some readers seem to stop here, but let us read the next verse which says: ¶

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:8-10.) ¶

This statement of Paul's is in harmony with that made by Jesus in his great Sermon on the Mount, when he said: ¶

Third Dag ¶

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven. (Matt. 7:20-21.) ¶

The Apostle Paul also wrote, as you also know, these words: ¶

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. (I Cor. ¶

3:1647.) ¶

A Law of Health ¶

As a means of preserving our bodies from certain types of defilement (destruction) the Lord gave to the Church in its very beginning, and to the human family generally, what has been properly called a law of health, better known among us as the Word of Wisdom. Qualified specialists in the field of science and medicine have said that food and drinks are the things that have more to do with bodily health than any other ordinary factor. So in recent years the science of dietetics — the science and art of feeding — has come into prominence and is based upon an immense amount of experimentation and research. The health of the individual and the health of the people in mass are extremely important, not only to the individuals themselves but also to the public. Hence civil governments, private humanitarian organizations, the Church, etc., are vitally concerned with problems of health. ¶

It is my purpose now, however, to make some remarks relative to only one of the many problems in the big field of things that affect human health. In section eighty-nine of the Doctrine and Covenants we find a revelation given to the Prophet Joseph Smith in February 1833, less than three years after the organization of the Church, in which abstinence from wine, strong drinks, tobacco, and hot drinks is enjoined, because they are not good for man. By hot drinks was meant primarily tea and coffee, though subsequent researches found that any drinks at high temperatures, such as hot water and soups, are harmful. The ideas voiced in the Word of Wisdom were expressed in words having the meaning current at the time. In those days hot drinks were commonly understood to be tea and coffee. The Church now interprets the words, wine and strong drinks, as meaning all alcoholic beverages, of which there are many varieties. ¶

In passing, it may be well to remark that the revelation on the Word of Wisdom was given at a time when scientific men knew but little, if anything, about basic facts of the science of dietetics. Since those days, and within the last fifty years, a vast amount of research has been done, and that pertinent to matters spoken of in the Word of Wisdom is confirmatory of the truths therein revealed. This fact should give joy and satisfaction to all Saints, for it is irrefutable testimony of the divinity of that great document. Time will not permit me now to go into detail concerning this testimony. I repeat, however, that a multitude of scientifically discovered fact's support the Word of Wisdom, and, so far as I know, none refute it. ¶

Misleading Advertisements ¶

Among these is the irrefutable fact that liquor and tobacco are not good for man. Science, experience, and revelation are in agreement on this statement. Then, why do people continue to use liquor and tobacco? Ask Satan, he knows. Satan is a deceiver, the father of lies, the inspiration of avaricious men engaged in promoting evils and cunning designs calculated to mislead the people, particularly the youth, into habits of drinking and smoking. To this end huge sums of money are continually spent in advertising propaganda material, much of it honeycombed with misleading and partially or wholly falsifying statements. A few years before the great global war began, an able investigator found that more than sixty million dollars was spent annually in the United States for advertising cigarets and alcoholic beverages. Since all of us have some idea of the power of money, is it any wonder that publicity agencies that accept liquor and tobacco advertisements, such as newspapers, magazines, and radios, are opposed to prohibition? ¶

Let me say here that smoking and drinking in this country have become so general that the enormous sum of ten and one-half billion dollars was spent during 1944 for liquor and tobacco, so it was authoritatively reported. ¶

I have just said that science, experience, and revelation agree that liquor and tobacco are not good for man. Let me specify a little. ¶

Injurious Effects of Tobacco ¶

Concerning the use of tobacco, it affects injuriously the heart and circulatory system, the lungs and respiratory system, the brain and mental powers, the nervous system, the kidneys and elimination organs, the muscular system, etc., thus weakening the body with the result that it is less resistant to diseases of various kinds. Recently there came from the press a new book relative to tobacco and its effects written by Dr. Frank Leighton Wood, entitled What You Should Know About Tobacco. Dr. Irving Fisher of Yale University wrote a foreword for the book in which he said: ¶

The tobacco problem has for years engaged my attention, both as to its economic and hygienic aspects. As treasurer of the Committee for the Scientific Study of the Tobacco Problem and as chairman of the Hygienic Reference Board of the Life Extension Institute, which has contributed more perhaps than any other agency toward solving the basic problem of tobacco, I have had unusual opportunities to become familiar with this many-sided problem.... The evidence now exists sufficient to show that no one who smokes can achieve the best of which he or she is capable, whether this be a foot race, a price fight, a golf game, tightrope walking, a rifle score, bombing the Reich, writing, speaking, singing, acting, performing on a violin, piano, or typewriter, attainment of health, strength, endurance, working power, beauty, glamor, or any other excellence on which men and women set their hearts. Prize fighters and acrobats know this. It is time that those ambitious in all other lines of work should learn it. ¶

Relative to the effect on the muscular system I give this illustration found in the 1938 edition of the standard book How to Live by Fisher and Emerson: ¶

Some years ago Dr. W. P. Lombard, professor of physiology in the University, of Michigan, conducted a series of observations for the purpose of determining the influence of smoking upon muscular work. He reported: "The record of these successive observations shows that the effects of one cigar of moderate strength was to lessen the work of which the subject was capable from seventy-five foot-pounds to fifteen foot-pounds, the number ot times that the weight could be lifted being reduced from eighty-six to twelve — over eighty percent. These figures indicate how seriously tobacco cuts down one's strength and endurance!" ¶

In his book, after pointing out many deleterious effects of the use of tobacco, Dr. Wood says: ¶

There is an aspect of the tobacco habit which, to some, is more important than its effect on life itself. A large number of people, including many doctors, are quite indifferent concerning their health or the possibility of dying prematurely. When confronted with facts concerning the life-shortening effects of tobacco or other habit-forming drugs, they may accept them but, in a spirit of bravado, may add that they would rather live their fifty years than exist for one hundred. In saying this they assume that the smoker lives a more happy, contented, and useful life than the nonsmoker. But does he? In the following chapters we shall show that, on the average, not only does the smoker die at a much earlier age than the nonsmoker but that he is more often afflicted with painful and disabling diseases of long duration and that in addition to this, he experiences various minor ills, such as annoying coughs, hoarseness, rawness of the throat, heartburn, shortness of breath, and many other disagreeable symptoms or diseases which are peculiar to those who use tobacco in any form. We shall show that he cannot excel in sports, as most people already know; that he will be handicapped in acquiring an education and for this reason may be likewise handicapped in satisfying his other aspirations in life. We shall show that even his character may be unfavorably affected.... We shall show that girls and boys and men and women who begin to smoke with the avowed intention of smoking in moderation and quitting the habit when they find that it is becoming harmful to them, nearly always smoke to a great excess and seldom quit the habit. No one can be at his best if he uses tobacco any more than the boxer, the runner, or the ball player can, for the use of this drug interferes with the blood supply, not only of the heart muscles but of every organ and part of the body, including the brain, the liver, the stomach, Bnd the reproductive organs, as we shall show. ¶

The use of tobacco shortens life. This fact was demonstrated satisfactorily to the whole scientific world on the appearance of a report by Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University, published in the journal Science, March 4, 1938. Dr. Pearl and his associates made complete life tables on 6,813 white men between the ages of thirty to seventy. He divided this group into three — 2,095 nonusers of tobacco; 2,814 moderate smokers; 1,905 heavy smokers. He found that between the ages of thirty and seventy the heavy smoker died, on an average, ten years younger than nonsmokers; that moderate smokers, on an average, also died from one to five years sooner. And as I have already quoted, smokers are less free from bodily ailments than are nonsmokers. So I repeat, the fact is that smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. ¶

May I quote a few words from the late Dr. A. L. Warner, who devoted a long life to the study of the evil effects upon the mind, body, and character of tobacco and was widely known for his writings on the subject? He wrote: ¶

A large majority of the young men of the United States have used tobacco. We are breeding a race of tobacco degenerates. The children inherit the narcotic craving from tobacco-using ancestors, making them as they grow older, easy addicts to tobacco, liquor, and other dope. Juvenile crime, vice, and degeneracy, steadily increase with the increased use of tobacco. The average age of crime in the United States has come down in sixteen years from age twenty-eight to nineteen. ¶

Extremely regrettable as it is, young women in the last few years have taken up smoking and the habit is rapidly growing among them. From an article written by Alonzo L. Baker, associate editor of the magazine Good Health, and entitled "Should Women Smoke?" I make a few quotations as follows: ¶

Here are two facts that should be borne in mind by every girl and woman in America: ¶

1. Tobacco harms women more physically than it does men. ¶

2. Tobacco does more damage to the race through mothers than through fathers. ¶

Naming some bad effects, he continues: ¶

A vital question is the effect of tobacco in pregnancy. These two facts are indisputable: ( 1 ) Nicotine is one of the few substances that passes through the placenta to the fetus; (2) Nicotine passes to the infant in its mother's milk. In view of the virulence of the poison that nicotine is, damage both to the unborn child and to the nursing child is inevitable when he is nicotinized before and after birth.... The smoking habit has become widespread among women of recent years only in America. Preliminary reports... thus far made indicate that the number of stillbirths and premature children born to habitually smoking mothers is markedly higher than for mothers who are abstainers from tobacco.... Just cause for alarm is the rapidly growing number of girls who form the tobacco habit before they have come to physical maturity. Smoking on the part of girls during their teen years is nothing less than a tragedy, for those are the years when nicotine does its greatest damage to the ■; growing nerve and glandular systems of the female body. ¶

Dr. D. H. Kress, another well-known objector to smoking, wrote on this particular point saying: ¶

For both man and wife to be addicted to smoke inhalation is destructive of everything that is good. Children born to such a pair had better never been born;... anything that is injurious to the child after its birth is equally injurious to it before its birth when indulged in by the pregnant mother. ¶

United States Surgeon General Hugh S. Cummings once wrote: ¶

When women generally contract the smoking habit (as they are now doing) the entire nation will suffer. The physical tone of the whole nation will be lowered. This is one of the most evil influences in American life today. The habit harms a woman more than it does a man. ¶

President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University once in talking to his freshman class on the subject of tobacco gave the following advice: ¶

My dear freshmen, I want you to remember that tobacco in any form destroys the brain, and you have none to spare. ¶

Alcohol a Curse ¶

Time will not permit my saying much relative to liquor. It is perhaps unnecessary to do so since the effects of drinking are more or less widely known. However, I ask your indulgence while I give two or three quotations from keen observers. The Journal of the American Medical Association said: ¶

Alcohol is a poison inherently, absolutely, essentially; in a drop or in a gallon, in all quantities and in every quantity, it is a poison. Plainly the quantity cannot effect its chemical constitution. ¶

And from the eloquent pen of the late keen-minded Robert G. Ingersoll, who knew how to describe alcohol in all its hellish effects on humanity, I give the following: ¶

Alcohol is the blood of the gambler, the inspiration of the burglar, the stimulus of the highwayman, and the support of the midnight incendiary. It suggests the lie and countenances the liar, condones the thief, and esteems the blasphemer. It violates obligation, reverences fraud, turns love to hate, scorns virtue and innocence. It incites the father to butcher his helpless offspring, and the child to sharpen the patricidal ax. ¶

Alcohol burns up men, consumes women, destroys life, curses God, and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perversity, defiles the, jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. It bribes voters, disqualifies votes, corrupts elections, pollutes our institutions, endangers the government, degrades the citizen, debases the legislature, dishonors the statesman, and disarms the patriot. It brings shame, not honor; terror, not safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happiness; and, with the malevolence of a fiend, calmly surveys the frightful desolation, and reveling in havoc, poisons felicity, destroys peace and ruins morals, wipes out national honor, curses the world, and laughs at the ruin it has wrought. It does that and more. It murders the soul; it is the sum of all villainy, the father of all crime, the mother of all abominations, the devil's best friend, and God's worst enemy. ¶

And from the inspired voice of the Church — that of the First Presidency — the following was said three years ago in this conference: ¶

Drink brings cruelty into the home; it walks arm in arm with poverty; its companions are disease and plague; it puts chastity to flight; it knows neither honesty, nor fair dealing; it is a total stranger to truth; it drowns consciousness, it is the bodyguard of evil; it curses all who touch it. ¶

Drink has brought more woe and misery, broken more hearts, wrecked more homes, committed more crimes, filled more coffins than all the wars the world has suffered. ¶

Yes, in accordance with the divine will, the Church stands absolutely and continuously opposed to smoking and to the consumption of all kinds of alcoholic beverages. It persistently calls to its members and to all others to abstain from the use of these body, mind, and soul destroying poisons. May the Lord give us all the desire and the strength to do so, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. ¶