Private Preface to Public Conflict – Sunday, October 1, 1944
For quite some time now, the war has been, and still is, our greatest immediate worry. The world is waiting prayerfully, solemnly, hopefully, for any news which will indicate the end in sight. Indeed, so absorbed have we become with this one great emergency, that it has overshadowed all else—to the point where we have more or less forgotten what were our worries before the war began. War takes so much of our attention and effort that there is seemingly little time to prepare for peace, but to prepare for peace is a grave and urgent obligation, because war is merely a symptom of a disease, the germs of which are already at work in times of peace.
Long before the actual outbreak of war, men are at war in their hearts. Our courts of law are filled with the evidence of private wars—of quarrels, hatreds, misunderstandings, lying, deception, covetousness, and infidelity—and war among nations is merely the organized evidence of what has been in the hearts and minds of men long before its actual outbreak—and the order to cease firing does not heal the souls of men, nor rid the world of its sorrows, nor quiet the hatreds and vows for vengeance, nor destroy the greed for power. And if perchance we have been guilty, any of us, of oversimplifying the problem, we should ask ourselves, in all frankness, what was the nature of our difficulties before war began? And then comes the next logical question: What have we done or what are we doing to justify the conclusion that those same conditions, or others equally aggravating, will not rise to plague us when war ceases?
Suppose we ask ourselves honestly what have we done to remove the basic causes of those troubles? What have we done, honestly, to clean our own house? And so, much as we yearn for peace, much as we shall rejoice when it comes, if peace should come without some changes in us and in others, it will inevitably fall short of our hopes and expectations. War is electrifying and absorbing. Despite its sordidness and sacrifice, its terror and its sorrow, in the preparation for war and in the waging of it, there is always an element of the dramatic and the spectacular which seems to fire the imaginations of men and stir them to heroic activity. But if men would have the peace they cherish, they must prepare for peace and pursue it as earnestly and heroically as they now wage war.
Heard over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Oct. 1, 1944. Copyright – 1944.
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October 1, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,789