Some Current Notes on Martyrdom – Sunday, October 10, 1943
We have read somewhere currently a brief statement of a challenging idea: “The greater the truth, the greater the danger.” Certainly the record will show that those who have advocated great truths, before the world generally has accepted them, have often stood in great danger. The history of martyrdom in all fields of thought and learning will bear this out. Prophets who have forecast coming events have often died for their testimony, but the generations have lived to see, often to their sorrow, the fulfillment of prophetic word.
Those who in the field of science have wrested from the unknown an understanding of things heretofore untaught and unbelieved, have often been the objects of scorn, ridicule, and persecution. Some of them have lived to see their own vindication, and some of them have not, but the long list of martyrs to truth is a frightening monument to human stupidity, ignorance, and intolerance. As one poet-philosopher expressed it: “Against stupidity the very Gods themselves contend in vain, ” (Schiller.) 1″‘But martyrs are not all confined to the past, and they aren’t all confined to the fields of science and religion. Those who, for example, undertake to crusade against current evils are very often martyrs, with cynicism and scorn and ridicule heaped upon them. Sometimes every act of their lives, including intimate and sacred and personal things, is paraded for public view by those whose business and profession it is to twist words and smear reputations. No matter how irreproachable a man’s life may be, if he undertakes to oppose a popular or profitable evil, he may expect to be represented as a public enemy, an obstructionist, a prophet of doom, and a good many other things less printable, by those who have the facilities and the motives for doing such things and who haven’t the conscience or the scruples not to do them. He who opposes popular but fallacious practices, he who sees and contends against dangerous trends and schemes, is inviting martyrdom in a sense—at least the martyrdom of his reputation—and perhaps social and political martyrdom. But if a man sees a quickening departure from hard-won ideals and fundamentals, and if he sees the gaining momentum of tendencies which are moving his generation or his people toward a precipice at the bottom of which lies certain wreckage, he has an obligation to speak his mind no matter what the currently popular philosophy is. And if he does speak his mind and becomes added to the list of those who have been persecuted for doing so, it is one more evidence of the high cost of presenting a new truth or defending an old one. True, the greater the truth, the greater is the danger, sometimes, to the individual who advocates it.
A contemporary generation is slow to forgive those who think and see ahead of them or who invite attention to their follies. But the greater the truth, the greater the safety ultimately for all—and martyrs for truth somehow have a way of living forever, with much greater peace and satisfaction in life than those who have opposed them.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, ‘Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Oct. 10, 1943, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1943.
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October 10, 1943
Broadcast Number 0,738