The End From the Beginning – Sunday, January 16, 1944
There comes to mind one of the pastimes of our childhood when we paused with wide-eyed children to watch the billposter, harbinger of circuses and travelling shows, skillfully ply paste and brush, and somehow make the parts of a ready-made picture, piece by piece, slip precariously into place—thus to tell all passers by of things to come.
The first piece may not have given much indication as to the pattern of the whole, but perhaps the second or the third did. Fragmentarily, we began to see parts of the man on the flying trapeze, or the giraffe, or the clown; or the hero helplessly hanging from the cliff with the sinister villain about to cut the rope; or the outlaw about to wreck the fast mail—and we experienced much impatience when we were past due at school or at home, waiting for the billposter to get far enough along with his work so that the entire design would be apparent, even if we couldn’t wait for the picture to be completed. We are not so much aware of late of the activities of these skillful plyers of paste and brush, perhaps because we take less time these days to be observant of some things that fascinated us in childhood. But there are other observable patterns continually taking shape around us, which must not pass unnoticed.
Some of them we no doubt would like, and some of them we surely would not like if we were to see the end from the beginning. Some of these projected pictures are personal in character and are designed to affect only an individual here and there; some encompass whole nations and peoples and the course of world events. Constantly there are all manner and combinations of planners and pattern-makers devising and scheming for one purpose or another, some to free men, some to enslave them; some who have sincere motives and bad methods; some who have plausible methods and questionable motives. There are misunderstood but honest humanitarians, and there are personable and attractive scoundrels.
There are villains about to wreck the fast mail, as there were in the days of the melodrama, but life isn’t fiction, and sometimes the hero doesn’t arrive in time. Said the Savior of mankind: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.” (Matthew 24:32-33.) Intimations of things to come have a way of preceding the arrival of the events themselves. By the first postings on the board often we may know what the finished picture is intended to be—and these are times, perhaps, when men would do well to take a lesson from a childhood experience, and learn to appraise the intended picture before all the pieces are pasted down.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Jan. 16, 1944, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1944.
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January 16, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,752