hren and
Sisters, I feel called upon to say a few words. I am not able to edify
you, but I can say that I know this is the Church and Kingdom of God,
and I bear my testimony that Joseph Smith was a Prophet and that Brigham
Young was his lawful successor, and that the Prophet Joseph F. Smith is
heir to all the authority which the Lord has conferred in these days
for the salvation of men. And I feel that if I live my religion and do
nothing to offend the Holy Spirit I will be saved in the presence of my
Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. With these few words I will give way.
Praying the Lord to bless each and every one of us is my prayer in the
name of Jesus Christ. Amen."

At fourteen he becomes a Deacon of the Church. Between that age and
twenty, he becomes an Elder. Very soon thereafter he becomes "a Seventy"
and perhaps a high priest. He takes upon himself "covenants in holy
places." He becomes "a priest unto the Most High God"--frequently before
his eighteenth year. Usually before he is twenty he is sent on a mission
to proclaim his gospel--the only one he has ever heard in his life--to
"an unenlightened nation" and "a wicked world." For, in addition
to being taught that the Mormons are the best, most virtuous, most
temperate, most industrious, and most God-fearing of all peoples--a
thing that is dinned into his ears from the pulpit every Sunday in the
year--he has been convinced by equal iteration that the rest of the
world is a festering mass of corruption.

Often he goes abroad, to some country whose language and customs he
must learn and upon the charity of whose toilers he must depend for his
maintenance. He goes with an implicit reliance upon God, strong in the
small virtues that have been taught him from the time he knelt at his
mother's knee. He sees, probably for the first time, the afflictions
and the sins among mankind; and he keeps himself unspotted from them,
congratulating himself that these grossnesses are unknown to his
sheltered home-life and to the religion which he holds as the ideal of
his soul. He proclaims his belief that God has spoken from the Heavens,
through the Mormon Prophet, in this last day, to restore the gospel
of Christ from which the peoples of the earth have wandered. He "bears
testimony" to the whole world, and he binds himself to the authority of
his Church by proclaiming his belief in it.

When he returns home, after years of service, he is called to the stand
in the tabernacle