The Search for Mysteries – Sunday, October 29, 1944
One reason for progress is the fact that there are always living among us those who are never content with what they know or with what other men know—those wholesomely restless spirits who are always searching for what lies beyond the obvious. To a greater or lesser extent this is a common characteristic of humankind. Somehow we like to pry out the secrets and search out the mysteries and try the untried. This quality, like all other useful qualities, is also subject to its abuses and excesses. Sometimes in looking for what lies beyond the obvious, we overlook what is obvious. Sometimes in our search for the mysteries, we ignore the plain and simple truth.
Sometimes in looking for elusive answers, we forget present realities. For example, there are those who are forever looking for the economic mysteries, always hoping that the factors of soundness can somehow be suspended for their particular convenience and peculiar purposes—searching for the mysteries of a procedure that will permit us to live beyond our means and still remain solvent. There are those who are forever looking for legal mysteries—searching for loopholes— hoping somehow to find a way of ignoring the laws both of man and of God and avoiding the consequences. There are those, too, who think so much upon the unrevealed and at present unknowable mysteries of heaven that they neglect the opportunities and responsibilities of earth. Now it is quite within reason to want to look beyond—but successful searching begins with facts—it doesn’t ignore facts; it begins with known truth—it doesn’t discard truth.
Progress is a process of improving upon the past—and not a process of throwing away the past, because the past has much of hard-earned truth, as well as much of error, and its truth must be preserved. In our quest for the unknown we must remember that many mistakes have already been made, that many things have been proved false, that much of truth is already discovered, that many questions have already been answered—and if, in searching for mysteries, we overlook the obvious, and disregard what has already been proved, we have moved backward rather than forward.
Heard over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Oct. 29, 1944. Copyright – 1944.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
October 29, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,793