Religion on Trial – Sunday, October 4, 1942
We live in a day when every standard of value is being challenged, and religion has not escaped the challenge. Perhaps this is because men have asked too much of religion and too little of themselves.
Many have supposed that a mere creed or code of belief, or statute of doctrines and dogmas, would take the place of self-effort. and self-mastery. Some have known the law but have not lived it. Some have not even bothered to know the law, but have left such knowledge to others, and have worshipped once removed, if at all. Some have placed convenience above truth. Some have permitted man-made sophistries to supplant the revealed word in their thinking and in their living. By some it has been supposed that religion was a system whereby men could have set aside the consequences of their own doings—another form of the false philosophy of getting something for nothing. And so, perhaps we should determine once and for all what we may rightly expect religion to do for us, and then judge its effectiveness or ineffectiveness by that standard.
It should not be expected to give us ease without effort or knowledge without study, or truth without search. We should not expect it to offer reward without work, peace without repentance, blessings without obedience, or exaltation hereafter without justifying our existence here. The Savior of the world gave us an indication of what we should expect of religion, when He spoke of the “wise man which built his house upon a rock, and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the wind blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not.” But the house of the foolish man was built upon the sand, “and it fell; and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27.)
The implication is plain. The floods and the winds came alike to the wise and the foolish. But one stood the onslaught, and the other fell before it. And that is what we should expect of religion—not that it should spare us the varied experiences of living, but that it should help us to understand them and sustain us through them; help us to grow beyond them, and prepare us for yet greater things. No man escapes all the vicissitudes of life—but be who has isolated himself from spiritual understanding, frequently breaks under the strain, and is brought low in the anguish of his own bitterness and in the blindness of his own unwillingness to see. But this uncertain groping and sense of defeat are they spared whose lives have been shaped by the principles and power of religion, pure and undefiled—by the everlasting truth of things both present and yet to come.
By RICHARD L. EVANS, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Oct. 4, 1942, over Radio Station KSL, and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright-1942.
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October 04, 1942
Broadcast Number 0,685