Spencer W. Kimball as Extemporaneous Speaker
Most of the acquaintance members of the LDS church have with Spencer W. Kimball as a public speaker comes from his prepared public addresses. He spoke at fifty-eight of the sixty-one general conferences of the Church held during his years as an Apostle (1943–73), missing only October 1948 after a heart attack and April and October 1957 after throat surgery. During most of his twelve years as President of the Church he spoke as many as five times at each conference. And he spoke several times at each of the many area conferences over which he presided. At BYU devotionals and on numerous other occasions he also spoke from prepared texts.
But the bulk of his public speaking was extemporaneous—several times at each of the stake or mission conferences he attended early every week for thirty years, at firesides, at seminary graduations, at service clubs, at missionary meetings, and on and on—thousands of times during his service as a Church leader from 1943 until his last public remarks in 1982.
The conference reports provide access to the full text of most of the formal talks. Some of these and several others given at BYU (particularly “Tragedy or Destiny?”) have been widely circulated by republication in the Church magazines or in pamphlet form. The only collection of sermons, Faith Precedes the Miracle, presents them edited for reading—by shortening lengthy quotations from the scriptures or other authors. They do not, therefore, completely reflect Spencer Kimball’s speaking style.
A slightly different facet of the man can be seen by looking at his extemporaneous speeches. Of the few examples extant, we offer two, in nearly verbatim transcript, retaining even the awkward phrases that one finds in extemporaneous speech. The first is an excerpt from a talk he gave on 21 October 1979, in Shepherd’s Field, a hillside opposite Bethlehem, Israel. Just a few weeks earlier he had undergone surgery for subdural hematoma on the right side of his brain. Though eighty-four years old and feeble, he had gone to Israel to dedicate the Orson Hyde Memorial Garden on the Mount of Olives. While there, he had been taken to a number of important biblical sites, and in his talk he reflected on that experience. From the audiotape it is evident that he spoke laboriously, every word an effort. This is the last extemporaneous talk of which we have a recording. It holds interest, also, for President Kimball’s expression of his views as to the location of the Mount of Transfiguration.
The second talk was recorded at a stake conference in Fresno, California, twenty-one years earlier, when Spencer Kimball was sixty-three and vigorous. In this address he began by speaking in Spanish, reading with difficulty a text that had been translated for him. He wished to demonstrate by his conduct the importance of integrating the Spanish-speaking members of the stake into as full participation as possible. In the sermon he speaks at length on parental responsibility, drawing on a newspaper report of research into the background of Utah prisoners as the skeleton for his remarks. He thus illustrates his penchant for using newspaper or magazine clippings as a framework on which to build his remarks. He was a voracious reader, always alert for ideas he could use. He had a dozen or more file drawers of folders containing clippings or notes from magazines, books, Church publications, conference reports, and items referred to him by others. Most bear the marks of his red pencil. In addition he had shelves of binders labeled “Sermon Seeds,” with the same sorts of materials and partial drafts of talks.
The talk draws power from its very roughness. It seeks to reach people directly, candidly, persuasively, not with polish and abstractions. In his oral presentation there is a kind of fervor and urgency that leaves no doubt about his conviction that what he is saying is of great and immediate importance to the lives of the people. It illustrates his character, particularly in extemporaneous discourse, as one who was less concerned with explaining doctrine than with encouraging righteous living.
President Spencer W. Kimball at Shepherd’s Field
Near Bethlehem, Israel
21 October 1979
Brothers and sisters . . . we have had some marvelous experiences this day. . . . We went first to Mt. Tabor and there we climbed to the top. I felt very sure that this was the spot where Jesus had taken his three disciples—Peter, James, and John—to this “high mountain apart” and there had given certain blessings. I felt a very warm spirit as twenty or more of us gathered together there. And I believe they all felt about the same. In the seventeenth chapter of Matthew, Peter said, “Lord, it is good to be here.” And he said, “Let us make three chapels, one for thee, two for thy servants [Moses and Elias].” I felt that was the place. I know there has been some disputation and difference of feeling about it since there are some other possible places, but I have always felt this.
I remember when Camilla and I and Howard Hunter and his wife came the first time. That time we came here from Babylon. . . . [We traveled] first to Damascus by air and then by taxi to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem. It was Christmas Eve and there was terrible confusion, with people here from all parts of the world. They were playing raucous music. It didn’t seem much like Christmas to us, nor like we were in sacred spots. So after we had glanced around a while, we got in another taxicab and came down here on these hills. Here we felt a different spirit. The four of us walked off by the fence in the darkness and there we spoke of serious things, and Brother Hunter offered the prayer. We had a sacred prayer, just the four of us, here in this sacred spot. . . .
We saw many places today wherein the Savior seemed to be near us. He seemed to be watching over us, and we feel a great inspiration that has come to us in being in this land. I would bear witness to you that the things which the Savior taught to us and taught to his servants through devious ways all these years are true, as true as truth can be truth. . . . I bear witness also that this is the truth, the gospel of Jesus Christ, of salvation and eternal exaltation for us all who will live the gospel as the Lord has taught us to do. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Elder Spencer W. Kimball at Stake Conference
Fresno, California
30 November 1958
Mis queridos hermanos y hermanas, les traigo saludos de los Hermanos de las Autoridades Generales. Les prometo que Dios los bendicirá al paso que guarden sus mandamientos y se conserven limpios. Ahora, [para] poder ganar las bendiciones gloriosas tienen que ser fieles hasta el fin. No deben ceder a la tentación. Santifiquen el día del Señor, pagen sus diezmos fielmente, guarden la Palabra de Sabiduría estrictamente, sean honorables y pagen sus deudas, den un día completo de trabajo por su salario, sean buenos y considerados con sus empleados, asistan a todos sus servicios regularmente, cumplan con todas las tareas que les sean señaladas, guárdense limpios de toda maldad, particularmente de los pecados sexuales. No olviden sus oraciones con sus familias. También, honren y estimen a sus esposas y maridos y crien a sus hijos en los días del Señor in todo respecto y todo promesa y convenio se cumplirá, cada bendición se da. Los estimo y los amo a todos. Dios los bendiga. En el nombre de Jesucristo. Amen.
[My dear brothers and sisters, I bring you greetings from the Brethren of the General Authorities. I promise you that God will bless you as you keep the commandments and maintain your worthiness. Now, in order to receive the glorious blessings, you have to remain faithful until the end. You should not yield to temptation. Sanctify the Sabbath day, pay your tithes faithfully, keep the Word of Wisdom strictly, be honorable and pay your debts, give a full day’s work for your salary, be considerate of your employees, attend all of your meetings regularly, fulfill all the assignments that have been given to you, keep yourselves from all evil, especially sexual sin. Don’t forget your family prayers. Also, honor your wives and your husbands and rear your children in all respect. If you do this, in the days of the Lord every promise and covenant will be fulfilled, every blessing received. I respect and love all of you. God bless you. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.]
I hope that all the people of the Fresno stake consider it a very great privilege to have one of the eighteen units a Lamanite unit. You are especially blessed and privileged. Very few stakes have that opportunity with the international aspect, the interracial aspect. The love of brother can be exemplified here as in few stakes. I am positive that the Lord has some extra blessings for everyone who assists the Lamanite cause. In your family prayers why don’t you pray for all the missionary work, but especially the Lamanite missionary work, and for the Lamanite cause.
I hope that the day will not be far distant when we may have a Lamanite high councilor in this stake of Zion. I hope we will have one or more Lamanites on every stake board in this stake. I hope they will be given every opportunity that others are given. I hope that in the quorums that they will be given their privileges. I hope that there will never be a stake conference in the Fresno stake without at least one Spanish testimony borne or a Spanish song sung or a Spanish prayer offered. That would be somewhere near their proportion of the population.
I love these people. I hope you do. If you don’t, something is wrong with you, because the Lord loves them. And if you love the Lord and his program you will love the Lamanites and you’ll do everything in your power for them.
I know I didn’t speak Spanish perfectly, but I hope they could understand what I was trying to say.
My theme this afternoon is grapes. This is a great grape-growing area. In the book of Ezekiel, the eighteenth chapter: “The word of the Lord came unto me again, saying, What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge?” [Ezek. 18:1–2].
Do you have sour grapes in this country? Every one I ever tasted was sweet. But I suppose that there is a time when you can eat sour grapes in the Fresno area. And if you do, if you eat enough of them, and if your teeth are like mine, they get very sharp. They cut my tongue, they cut my cheek, and you have your teeth on edge.
That scripture refers back to Jeremiah. (See if I can turn to it.) “In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge” [Jer. 31:29–30]. That works both ways. If the father gets up in the morning cross—with sour grapes—his children will suffer. His wife is likely to be cross, too, even when he comes home that night. The sour grape message carries on through the day. If the father sins, the child may sin, too.
[Inaudible] . . . “Behold, every one that useth proverbs shall use this proverb against thee, saying, As is the mother, so is her daughter. Thou art thy mother’s daughter, that lotheth her husband and her children; and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which lothed their husbands and their children: your mother was an Hittite, and your father an Amorite” [Ezek. 16:44–45], and so on.
It is amazing how many divorces come to the children when the mother and the father are divorced. It is amazing how easy it is for the children to fail the family prayers when the parents fail in their family prayers. It is not surprising when children will not go to church or their meetings when the father and the mother do not go. Do you see the sour grapes? They go right on down through the generations.
Some time ago in the Deseret News there was an editorial that I clipped. I think the reading of some of those paragraphs might be of interest to you. For the benefit of the children, down at the Point of the Mountain about twenty miles from the center of Salt Lake City is a very large and portentous prison, a penitentiary. You all know who go to penitentiaries. It is men and women who do bad things, who break the laws, who go against the policies and program of society. They end up in the penitentiary. The penitentiary is not a building like this with open doors, but is locked with heavy metal gates. The keys are carried by paid guards. There are places in there that are the death cells—where men lie waiting for the day when they will be executed for breaking the laws of man and of God and of society. That is an ugly picture. But it is there and it is all over the land and a tremendous amount of your taxes go to support the men who live generally in idleness, with total security—shelter, food, clothes, and everything that is necessary for their well-being and their livelihood. They have it all, free. Well, how do they come to get into the penitentiary? They never go from the goodness of a righteous home into a penitentiary. It is never done. There is a gradual loss of righteousness. One is never good today and bad tomorrow, or bad today and good tomorrow, it is a process.
It is like the Niagara River. Most of you have been there, the older ones. The river starts out just an ordinary river. It just flows along rather gradually and finally gets a little more steep and a little more steep and finally comes to the edge if the precipice and drops down a tremendous distance into the holes and whirlpools beneath. That is the way men and women and boys and girls are. They never just fall off the precipice. They have a long process of skidding before they get there. How do they do it? They begin by failing their prayers, by stealing nickels and dimes. Never bank robberies at first, it’s little, a pencil or something at school, and the mother and father go back and have some bad words to say to the teacher because their particular little child did something wrong. The parents who go back and excuse their children, alibi for them, pay back their little debts, they are the ones whose sons and daughters end in the penitentiary. The fathers and mothers that meet issues realizing that children are children—they’re all human being—the child that steals a nickel, or a dime, or a quarter goes back and makes it good—that’s the child that will grow into righteousness. The child that is forced from the beginning to meet issues and not to go around them, not to evade them.
Somebody made a study of these men in penitentiary in Utah. They took a large number of them who were willing to cooperate. Why not? They are there for long times, some of them maybe for all their lives with no hope of getting out. So they told all about their lives, their childhood, their youth, their temptations, their teenage, their weaknesses, and their strengths. It is a very interesting but sordid picture. Then they took an equal number of men, same age, the same area, same general background, same race, everything as near as they could the same. They called them the normals. They are the people in the professions and the businesses, laborers, school teachers, and many walks of life, just the ordinary people, not the best, not the worst, just the average people. Then they went to work to contrast the normals and the prisoners. May I read a few excerpts that I think may be interesting to you? First, they were the same sex, as far as possible the same intelligence, and same general background. These were some of the findings. One, the prisoners’ parents were footloose. They lived in trailer camps, they lived in houses for rent. They didn’t own their own homes. Remember there are exceptions in both directions. But these are generalities that developed in the study. The families from which the prisoners came tended to be more mobile, footloose. They moved oftener and greater distances. They didn’t get their roots set down. They didn’t belong to communities. They didn’t contribute to communities. Prisoners came from broken homes five times as often. What is a broken home? There are a lot of broken homes. There are broken homes where there is divorce, where the mother carries forward for the children or the father does; those are broken homes. There are broken homes where the mother and father still both live in the home, but they are quarreling and cussing all the time. They are not a unit, they are two people; they are not one, but two. Those are broken homes, and there are many. And the great majority of the prisoners in the penitentiary, the boys and girls in reform schools, come from those homes.
Any woman and any man who is beginning to feel a little antagonized by his or her companion, who doesn’t know whether he or she can stand it any longer with this particular spouse, had better think about ten times before they make a decision to make a break. They better get busy, go back together, understand each other’s weaknesses, learn to forgive, accept forgiveness. They must, for they are selfish when they say, “I am entitled to peace, to happiness; therefore I am going to divorce my husband, my wife, so I can have peace and happiness.” Almost nobody ever gets it that way. It is selfish, tremendously selfish, when a man and a woman will throw away the future of their children in order to get a little peace for themselves, which peace can never and will never come through divorce. If that man and that woman are going to be happy later on in their life in their second, third, or fourth marriage, they will have made their own adjustments because divorce cures nothing. It merely separates them, and if they take their present weaknesses with them into their second, third, and fourth marriages, they are only asking for continued trouble. There are rare exceptions, I say. So the thing to do, of course, is for smart people to be smart, to go back and analyze one’s own weakness, eccentricities, and then forgive those of his or her spouse. Let peace come that way. It can never be otherwise. It has got to be a conscious effort on the part of two people who are willing to give and take, but mostly give, who are willing to take problems but give instant forgiveness. And so, five times as many of the prisoners came from selfish mothers and fathers who would prefer to be at peace themselves rather than to have their children grow up in righteousness. The homes of the prisoners were characterized more often as negative and full of contention. If the father and mother have to adjust their problems, if they have problems, misunderstanding, how thoughtless to ever say a word before their children. Go in a closet, close the door, discuss the problem sanely, salvage it, save it. The children must never know that their parents have had misunderstandings. You have them of course, most parents will.
There are very few of you in this room that do not have misunderstandings, but most of you have had courage, strength, and determination enough to go back and solve your problems. I have marital problems in my office every week, sometimes day after day. I have them come thinking they are the only people that ever had any problems. They have neighbors across the street the same age as they are, and the neighbors are supremely happy, and they say, “Why do we have all the problems, and their stream runs calmly and tranquilly along?” They are quite surprised when I say, “Wait a minute. You both started with the same kind of opportunities, same beautiful prospects, a happy marriage, and then began to come the problems. One, two, three, four, five, and on and on—the problems. What happened? The other couple solved their problems, you folks fell victims to yours. They settled them, you let them become serious and sad in your life. They solved, you became a defeated soul and you thought divorce would cure it, and it wouldn’t.” Only one of five prisoners could honestly describe his parents’ relationship as excellent. Can you see why the father and mother, if they are going to have children, must have excellent marital relationships, excellent family relationships at all costs, at all costs.
My little girl grew up and got married. One day she came to her mother. She and her husband had a little misunderstanding, like other people do, and she said, “Mother, why is it that my husband and I have these misunderstandings and these heartbreaks, and aching hearts, when you and Dad never had one in all your lives?” Sister Kimball laughed at her. She was married now, so you talk to her pretty frankly. She said, “If you only knew!” Of course we have a lot of misunderstandings. We are both strong people, strong ideas. Both had made our lives very well before we were married. (We didn’t marry until we were 22!) I tell couples, like this mother told this young girl, “Of course we had misunderstanding, but we had sense enough to go in the bedroom and talk them out. We didn’t talk them out on front of our children. In great part they didn’t know about it. And they didn’t grow up frustrated.”
How selfish can mothers and fathers be that will let their little children ever hear a cross word between parents. Not all children go to the penitentiary who have those kind of parents, but there is a good chance they will. Mothers of normals remember to be more open, straightforward, and consistent in their expression of love and disapproval. Now a good mother is not necessarily one who gives a child everything he wants. It is a mother that is consistent, a father who goes down the lines, always the same. Fathers, in the case of the prisoners, more frequently were lax in the control of their sons, short-tempered and nervous. Parents of the prisoners tended to be either too soft or too brutal. It is just as bad to give your child everything he wants as to give him nothing he wants, just as bad. And no one can say she is a kind of a mother to be proud of if she yields to every whim of her child. And because a child wants a car, or wants a trip, or wants this or that or the other, no father is a real father who yields to all of those desires, unless they are righteous, of course.
A woman came to me the other day from Idaho, a long, long distance. She couldn’t see her bishop because he didn’t know about these things. She had to come all the way to Salt Lake to see one of us. She said that her children neither respected her nor her husband. Why? I asked her a lot of questions. “Isn’t your husband a good man?” “Oh, yes.” “A good Latter-day Saint?” “Oh, yes.” “True and worthy?” “Oh, yes, indeed.” “Well then, why don’t they respect each of you?” Then it leaked out word by word as I talked to her. The husband was cross. He got up and quarreled with the children. He cussed them—I guess that’s the best word—and wasn’t going to take it. And so, instead of doing the right thing about it, she began to shield the children. She put them under her cloak, under her wing, and there came a big, deep chasm—the father on one side and the mother and the children on the other. Now she thought the children should love her, but they didn’t. They hated her for it. They hated the father for his part. I said to her, “My dear sister, why don’t you go home and marry your husband and become his wife? Why have you stolen your children from your husband?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You have stolen your children, kidnapped them away from your husband. Now, why didn’t you go in the closet and close the door and say, ‘Father, these children are being frustrated by your continual nagging.’ Maybe you’d have some effect. At any rate, why didn’t you clean it up?” I said, “Why did you go steal the children from him and make the children hate him?” I said, “How much do they love you?” And she said, “Not at all. They have no respect for me.” Why? because she didn’t discipline. She was too soft. She gave them everything they ever wanted and she tore them literally out of the heart of their father. I see that every day in lesser or grater degree. Parents, then, of the prisoners are too soft or too brutal. We do not believe in brutality, neither do we believe in softness. Parents must not be erratic or inconsistent. They must be wise, flexible, understanding, and lovable. Parents of the normals tended to take a more middle-of-the-road course. They also tended to use verbal methods and isolation more often in their efforts to control, teach, and discipline.
Someone was telling me the other day that they had in their kitchen a little stool over in one corner. The name of the stool is the thinking stool. Some people would call it the dunce stool or something else. But this was the thinking stool. Whenever the child is cross or belligerent or cries, he goes and sits on this stool in the corner and thinks and thinks and thinks until he has everything straight, and then he comes back, and the next day he doesn’t have to sit on the thinking stool. That’s what they mean by verbal methods and isolation methods rather than with the stick, and the foot and hand or slapping or beating. Once in a great while—perhaps a time or two or three or four in every child’s life—the rod would be a wonderful thing for him. I hope there is no family that has totally discarded the rod, but no brutality.
Perhaps of special significance in this age of busyness was the finding that there was no apparent difference in the father-son relationship in regard to the amount of time together, for example, fishing or camping. What is important, the study disclosed, was not how often the father goes places with his son, but what he does with his son when he is with him—in other words, the quality of the relationship, rather than the quantity. That is exactly what I told the bishops and counselors last night as we were setting apart them and their wives. They and their wives listened and I told them exactly that. If the stake presidency, and the high council, and the bishoprics, and other Church leaders, their husbands who had the positions, if they will give themselves generously to their sons the two or three days they are home, that will amount to infinitely more in the child’s life than if they were there all seven days, twenty-four hours a day, but didn’t give himself to his child. Therefore, I said to them, you can follow the example of the authorities of the Church. In general, with exceptions, they are successful parents. You can spend time in the Church and still, when you are home, have good relationships with your children. Even when fathers are often gone, they can spend much time with their children in family night, family picnics, in family prayer, and in other situations.
The normals had significantly greater religious involvement, both before and after puberty, than did the prisoner group. Don’t overlook this. We preach about it all the time. The children whose parents have a religious concept that is strong and virile, those children will be your community leaders. Those children whose parents have no religious foundations, who do not attend their meetings, whether they are Catholics or Protestants or Jews, whoever they are, if they have no hitching post or foundations, their children are likely, that is there is a better chance for them to end up in the penitentiary and the reform schools, at least in broken homes themselves, divorces and unhappy lives. The greater significance was the religious involvement and attendance of the parents, especially the father. More than twice as many fathers of normal attended the church services often than did the fathers of the penitentiary men. That’s a sin in itself, that’s all that needs to be said. And if every boy and girl who anticipates marriage, every young couple that has gone into marriage would ponder that one statement, it would be enough. Twice as many fathers of the normals go often to church as the fathers of the subnormals. It is a great sermon. Many fathers have said, “Well, I can do this. My son will grow up righteously anyway.” But like father like son, like mother like daughter. A few weather the storm. Most of them capitulate and fall.
The findings agree with another study made with delinquent boys and girls. They compared the same. Thirty percent of the delinquents’ fathers were rated as religious whereas 71 percent of the fathers of the nondelinquents. That bears out what I said. Your children have a tremendously better chance if their fathers were at priesthood meeting, to Sunday school, to the sacrament meeting and do all the other duties. The normals engaged in family prayer more often—57 percent of the normals were having family prayer or they came from family-prayer homes. Only 34 percent of the delinquent children came from homes that ever have family prayer. That is another sermon. Family prayers give your children a tremendous edge, increasing the chance that they will be happy in their home, they will marry right and their marriage will be successful. Of the normals, 93 percent came from homes that believed in God. A very much smaller percentage of the delinquents came from homes that believed in God. Now, coming back to the courtship angle, of the prisoners at least 50 percent as teenagers dated or were out with a gang three, four, or more nights a week. The normals spent more home time.
I went down the street in Salt Lake the other day at seven o’clock in the evening, pitch dark, and here was six or seven little children not over ten or eleven out in the dark. What were they doing out of their homes? They couldn’t have been playing ball, because they couldn’t see the ball; it was dark. What were they doing on the streets, and what were their mothers thinking about, and their fathers? The children who are in their homes at night, who stay home longer, who do not date as soon, have a much better chance for a happy marriage and for a normal life. And here let me say, the Church is making a strenuous effort to get all the people to teach their youth to date late, not to begin dating [too soon].
Don’t let your little girls go to parties with boys before they are in their teens—never, never, and even in their early teens. Let them go in groups and have a glorious time, boys and girls together, for a long time. Then when they date it will mean something to them. A little shorter period of dating, and then a little shorter period of steady dating—no steady dating until they are way along in their teens. That’s the Church program, that’s the Lord’s program. I hope you parents are listening, I hope you boys and girls are. Don’t you get excited. You have plenty of years. When you are fifteen you have five or six or seven years before marriage and plenty of time to date and to find the right man, the right girl. They found that children who have brothers and sisters to fight for them, brothers and sisters to teach them, to discipline, were better boys and girls than the ones that were alone. (There are exceptions there.) Where older children do disciplining, they can knock each other around and save the parents an awful lot of trouble sometimes. They found that the children who became prisoners were often isolated, they lived alone, they roamed the streets. The better children go in crowds—I don’t mean gangs, I mean nice crowds of many young men and many young women—their parties, their dances, their picnics, their school, all their functions as crowds for a long, long time before they begin to break up into pairs, which of course is extremely important. They found it was a dangerous thing for boys and girls to go with older people. You don’t ever want to let a fifteen-year-old girl go with a twenty-year-old man. Never. Nor vice versa, of course. It is a very dangerous thing because she is not ready to match the thinking of a twenty-year-old person.
One or two more things and I must go.
The normals received better grates. Not that they were more intelligent. The prisoners had just as good gray matter, but they [the normals] got better grades. They stayed at home and did their homework. They followed the normal path and were not out wasting their time. They found that the normals came from homes well established—better-trained people, the educated folks. I don’t mean highly educated. But the unskilled people furnished more prisoners than do the skilled people.
They found 64 percent of the normals received their first sex education from their parents, or teachers, mostly parents. But the men in the penitentiaries and boys in the reform schools received their sex education from their companions; they got it the ugly way. The parents gave it to their children the beautiful way so they could understand.
I think I won’t go any further than that, only to say in my final appeal, will every one of you parents who still have children under your roof, will you develop a consistent, continuous program of education to your children? Will you tell them the things they ought to know at six, eight, ten, and twelve, and fourteen, and sixteen, and eighteen? Will you warn them against all the sex deviations? Will you fortify them and strengthen them, so they will know what’s what, know the dangers and know how to protect themselves against it? Don’t leave it to teachers. Teachers cannot do the job that fathers and mothers can do, because the father and mother only has one, or two, or three girls; four, or five, or six boys. They come at changes in their lives at different periods. The father and mother see them every day, can analyze the pulse, the heartbeat. They know when they should be saying something by way of clarification.
Summarizing, then, brothers and sisters, if you want your children to have their teeth on edge, find the sour grapes. And you know what the sour grapes are—they are frustrations in the homes, lack of attention to family prayers, neglecting paying tithing, the little criticisms that come at the breakfast and the dinner table of the Church and Church authorities. You know what the sour grapes are, you’ve tasted them, you know people who have tasted them, and we’ve seen children with teeth on edge. God grant that all the children of this stake of Zion may grow into rich and full maturity with a deep and abiding background that will take all your boys into the mission fields, every boy and girl to the holy temple and every son and daughter into happy, eternal marriage, I pray, with my blessings upon you, my congratulations to you, my love for you, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.