The Spoken Word – Sunday, August 18, 1940
Every once in a while, and with increasing frequency lately it seems, someone has the idea that he is going to do something for some great mass of mankind someway or other–perhaps for their general enlightenment or for their physical comfort, or for their political well-being or for their pride or security, or in other ways. Sometimes the motives of these would be benefactors are sincere and unselfish. Sometimes they are not. But that is not the issue in question.
The point is this: fundamentally speaking there is no such thing as a mass of humanity. We have used the term generally to describe a great number of people, but men are still men, individually, as are women and children, with all of their separate and distinct differences of countenance and character and body and mind and spirit — even in those places in which they are no longer treated as such. You cannot make a mass of people comfortable. A man is comfort- able as an individual or he isn’t comfortable. You cannot feed a mass of people. A child is well nourished as an individual or he isn’t well nourished. You can’t educate a mass of people. You may only educate men and women and children as individual entities. You can’t bring salvation to any mass of men collectively. They must have faith, they must believe, they must give obedience to the principles and ordinances of the Gospel, they must find conversion and salvation and exaltation not enmasse but each thinking and acting for himself as a child of God with an immortal spirits an eternal destiny and a distinct intelligence and personality which never was and never will be an integral part of any mass and never was and never will be anything but its own self.
Of such is the basic principle of democracy; such is the foundation of religion pure and undefiled; such is the essence of immortality and eternal life; and that is why those social philosophies, political systems, and man-made creeds are untenable which seek to deny the internal individuality of the immortal soul, or to violate the dignity of the common man. The condition of humanity does not change as the tide rises and falls. Whenever there is any change in this so-called mass of humanity, it is because men and women, even as you and I, have changed individually. And so, when you want to help humanity, help the individual man to help himself, and the problem of the mass will silently fade away.
August 18, 1940
Broadcast Number 0,574