Human Potential

Wilt thou be with woman as thou hast with man, to strengthen her where she is weak that she may aid in the defense of truth and right, and where her voice is heard throughout the broad face of the earth, may it have echo in the hearts of the honest, and may she serve to smooth the wrinkles of unjust laws, as she does and has, the pillows beneath the aching heads of thy soldiers and servants.

If the days of man are to begin to return, we must cease all extravagant living. When men live to the age of a tree, their food will be fruit. Mothers, to produce offspring full of life and days, must cease drinking liquor, tea, and coffee, that their systems may be free from bad effects. If every woman in this Church will now cease drinking tea, coffee, liquor, and all other powerful stimulants, and live upon vegetables, etc.

The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.

The naturalistic disposition of Mormonism is found in the denial of the traditional conception of the supernatural. It is typical of Mormon writers to insist that even God is natural rather than supernatural, in that there is not a divine order of reality that contrasts essentially with the mundane physical universe of ordinary experience known to us through sensory data, which is the object of scientific investigation and is described by natural law. The naturalistic facet of Mormon thought is indicated by the Mormon denial of miracles in the traditional sense of an intrusion of the supernatural that suspends the natural processes. The typical Mormon conception of a miracle is that the miraculous event, though entirely natural, is simply not understood because of deficiencies in human knowledge. From the perspective of God there are no miracles.

The Mormon concept of man exhibits the affirmative qualities relating to the capacity of human reason and the possibilities of free moral endeavor that characterized Enlightenment thought in the early part of the nineteenth century, that were basic to the liberal Protestantism in the latter part of that century and into the present, and that today lie at the foundations of typical secular humanism that has issued from American intellectual life. But Mormonism’s conception of human possibility far exceeds those of humanism and the standard forms of religious liberalism. Its conception of man is an integral element in the doctrine of cosmic progress that lies at the foundation of both its metaphysics and religion and that informs the general character of all Mormon thought. It is held that, in the forward, upward movement of the world in which God himself is involved, the human soul has infinite possibilities, because in an infinite time through the progressive achievement of knowledge and the mastery of moral will it may even know a measure of perfection that marks the attainment of divinity. Such a doctrine, of course, is an invitation to an easy speculation that some Mormon theologians have been unable to resist. And from it has issued a plethora of ideas that at times are quite irresponsible as serious doctrine. Such ideas are, nevertheless, a frank and ample testimony of the possibile reaches of liberal religion when supported by a conception of God that is grounded in the same optimism that nourished the liberal estimate of man.