The Fears of the Guilty – Sunday, June 11, 1944
These are anxious days for all of us—days in which the most cherished things in our lives are at stake. Seemingly, there is scarcely a home but what awaits news of someone, somewhere, somehow, involved in the issues that breathlessly hang in the balance. We live in a contagion of tension—but if we have anxiety in our hearts, think what must be the fears of those who have perpetrated these things and who must now know that they await the inevitable.
The guilty are peculiarly susceptible to dark thoughts and to acrid anticipation. And then contemplate what must have been the long-suffered anguish of those who have lived as conquered peoples, daily enduring a fear calculated to stamp out their very thoughts. But even such fear is not to be compared with the fear of the guilty. In a desperate situation, the innocent may abide in the knowledge that all possible consequences are equal, because eventually all wrongs will be righted, and even those who die shall yet live to see that day. But the inevitable justice which is sweet to the innocent, is the terror of the guilty; and while through the centuries the conquerors of captive peoples have often dealt in fear, history has shown that the intended victims were not the real victims. The conquering masters of others have neither mastered themselves nor their own fears.
They have found cause to live in apprehension night and day—cause to surround themselves with bodyguards, whom they also fear—to fear each other—to live in fear of food prepared by the hands of others—to live in fear of the judgments both of men and of God. Somehow these words of John the Revelator come to mind: “And the kings of the earth . . . and the mighty men . . . hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us . . . For . . . who shall be able to stand?” (Revelation 6:15-17.) Such are the unconquered fears of those who are guilty, whoever or wherever they may be, as they see the inevitable day approach. And so, heavy though they be, our fears are light compared with those of others. May our sons and our brothers out there be protected, and comforted, and sustained. And after they have done that which they have to do, may the wounds of the world be healed as men make peace with themselves by setting in order their own lives.
Heard over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, June 11, 1944. Copyright – 1944.