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The Religious Educator Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

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The Religious Educator Perspectives on the Restored Gospel Portrait of Elder James E. Talmage © by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. Used by permission. “How Long, Oh Lord, How Long?” James E. Talmage and the Great War Richard E. Bennett Richard E. Bennett is a professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU. What is it that is happening? A war greater in area and scale and more fearful in carnage, than any that has ever been since life on the round world began. Five months—no more—have passed since the first gun was fired, and already the list of men who were strong, healthy, capable, keen, five short months ago, and who are now stark in death, outnumbers anything of its kind in human history. And to reckon up the load of sheer blank sorrow in innumerable homes, and the actual but incidental war sufferings, short of death, or possibly worse than death, would baffle the power of any man. Put thus bluntly, it is all horrible beyond words.lxvi1 So spoke Randall Thomas Davidson, archbishop of Canterbury, in a sermon he delivered at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on 3 January 1915. Lest we forget, more than nine million men in uniform and legions of civilians died on the battlefields, battleships, and bombed-out byways of the First World War. Another twenty-one million were scarred and disfigured. Whatever the causes of the conflict, they have long been overshadowed by the “sickening mists of slaughter” that, like a plague, hung over the world for four and a half years. The battles of the Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Jutland, Passchendaele, and Gallipoli—these and many more are synonymous with unmitigated human slaughter in what some have described as a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century technology. This conflict brought the awful stalemate of protracted trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat and introduced, on a wide scale, submarine warfare, chemical gas mass killings, and tank attacks and aerial bombings. Yet what should have been the “war to end all wars” became the catalyst for an even deadlier conflict a generation later. The Great War was likewise an assault on faith, particularly Christian faith, in ways scholars continue to debate. As damaging, perhaps, to Christian thought as are the theories of scientific determinism and of higher criticism and its questioning of biblical authority, the war’s cold clash of death struck deep into the conscience of established Christianity. As one religious leader put it: “How is it with the Christian religion at the Front? . All verdicts must be rough in war. War is a muddy business, encasing the body in dirt and caking over the soul. It forms hard surfaces over the centres of sensitiveness.”lxvii2 Though Church leaders had much to say about the war, the focus of this article is restricted to a study of the ruminations and writings of Elder James E. Talmage, the English-born Apostle, scientist, seasoned scholar, and trusted Latter-day Saint theologian. lxviii3 The author of such seminal studies as the life and mission of Christ, the Articles of Faith, the place and purpose of the temple, and the Great Apostasy, Elder Talmage was asked to make a nationwide speaking tour to explain the Latter-day Saint view of the war.lxix4 His private journals and public sermons offer a unique vantage point from which to view how a modern Apostle interpreted, on behalf of his church, the tumultuous times associated with World War I.lxx5 Like many others, Elder Talmage was surprised at the sudden outbreak of the war, triggered as it was by the assassination of Austria’s archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist in late June 1914. “One of the surprising features is the suddenness with which the storm of war has broken,” he recorded on 5 August, one day after Great Britain had declared war on Germany. lxxi6 “The war situation in Europe has grown more formidable with the passage of days,” he wrote two weeks later, concluding that “Austria’s insistent demands on Serbia formed rather the excuse than the cause of what has developed into the greatest war of all history.”lxxii7 A Witness to Suffering For much of the forepart of the war, Elder Talmage spoke little of blame and much of suffering attendant to the war. He was deeply troubled by the scale of human suffering. “Every day brings news of the progress of the terrible conflict in Europe,” he wrote at the end of August 1914. “All the news that comes is censored, and it is certain that we do not get the whole truth . [but] if the despatches are at all reliable, there are today under arms over 10,000,000 men, and the dead already reported number many scores of thousands, and the end is not yet in sight.”lxxiii8 A peace-loving man, Elder Talmage was shocked and dismayed by the unfolding drama of death and prayed for a speedy termination. In one entry of his journal, representative of scores of others, he wrote: “The war news becomes more terrible with the days. The fatalities and other casualties are horrible to contemplate.”lxxiv9 Very early on, Elder Talmage formulated his views of the war—views that would, for the most part, remain remarkably consistent over the next four years, albeit with some modifications. Speaking at the general conference of the Church on 6 October 1914, the fifty-two-year-old leader staked out the following positions: (1) God, our Heavenly Father, is not responsible for the war; (2) the war is a fulfillment of prophecy; (3) on a grander scale, the war is a continuation of a premortal struggle between good and evil; (4) the war is a remarkable sign of the imminent return of Christ; (5) though man is entirely at fault, God will redeem it all for good; and finally, (6) ours is neither to condemn the aggressors nor to take sides (the one view he would modify over time). The Role of God in War As to the role of Providence, the war was neither God’s doing nor, for that matter, Satan’s alone. “Some go so far as to say that the hand of God being in all things, God Himself is responsible for all that is, and for all that takes place. I have heard it taught by advocates of a frivolous theology that whatever is, is in accordance with the will of God. My whole soul revolts against such conceptions as that.” Ever the advocate of the agency of man, this strict antideterminist went on to describe as “absurd” the belief that God’s infinite foreknowledge “determines what shall take place.” “Let us be men and be willing to take the blame for our evil acts, if we have chosen the evil,” he said. Nor was the war, strictly speaking, the devil’s own doing. “If Satan and his hosts were bound today and no longer able to work personally upon the earth, evil would go on for a very long time, because he has very able representatives in the flesh.”lxxv10 Man is his own agent and brings upon himself many of his greatest sufferings—sufferings that are in his power to avoid and ameliorate. The War as Fulfillment of Prophecy As to the fulfilling of prophecy, Elder Talmage was a staunch advocate of the uniquely Latter-day Saint view that the Prophet Joseph Smith had predicted such a tragedy more than seventy years before. “Terrible as is the conflict, it was foretold by prophetic voice and it marks the fulfilment of prophecies depicting conditions of the last days preparatory to the coming of the Son of Man.”lxxvi11 Quoting from the Doctrine and Covenants, he often read the prophecy that tells of the Southern states dividing against the Northern states in the Civil War of 1861–65, after which Great Britain would “call upon other nations” to defend itself “and then war shall be poured out upon all nations” (D&C 87:1–3). To Elder Talmage, divine prophecy, though absolutely certain, could never be construed as a divine imposition upon the agency and affairs of humankind. On various occasions during and after the war, Elder Talmage took delight in recounting the story of listening to a leading scholar of the age, Dr. David Stan Jordan, who, in speaking at the Mormon Tabernacle just before the outbreak of the war, had stressed the impossibility of such a conflagration. Said Elder Talmage: I spoke with the gentleman here in this stand, at the conclusion of his address, in substance to this effect: “I wish I could believe you, Doctor.” “You don’t?” “I do not.” “What is wrong with my deductions?” “They may be logically drawn, but your premises are wrong. You have failed to take into account certain essential factors; you have discarded and ignored the predictions of the prophets; and on such a question as this I shall accept the word of the prophet rather than the conclusion of the academician.” . Within a short span of months after that time, several of the most powerful nations of the world were locked in the death-grapple, which has been tightening with the passage of the years. So, as I read the words of the prophet that war should be poured out upon all nations, and that in this day and dispensation, in which we live, this the land of Zion should be the only land wherein safety might be found. lxxvii12 Though a believer in prophecy, Elder Talmage was never a fatalist. People could change and repent and bring about an end to suffering and conflict.
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