“Thus Shall Every One Say That Hath Built Up Churches and Not Unto the Lord”

K. Douglas Bassett

Book of Mormon Prophecy, Warner, pp. 198-203; The Screwtape Letters, Lewis, p. 3

“Several years ago in a seminary recognized as perhaps the greatest in this country, a doctor of divinity, who had a string of honorary doctoral degrees and who is on the board of directors of one of the largest Protestant churches in America, in lecturing to a large group of students, most of whom already had bachelor of divinity degrees, said sympathetically: ‘I know that it is difficult for you men to teach creeds which you, yourselves do not believe, but you have the social obligation to do it.’ Another man in the same institution, having about the same academic credentials, declared: ‘Who knows but what in the year 2004 or some other year, there will live a man who will love more perfectly than did Jesus. Then we will worship him as the Son of God, rather than Jesus. The reason we worship Jesus as the Son of God is because he lived the most perfect life of any man of whom we have knowledge.’” (A. Theodore Tuttle, Conference Report, Oct. 1960, p. 54)
“I doubt if there was a Christian minister in all the world who would have said there was no devil at the time the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, and yet when a questionnaire was sent out by the Northwestern University School of Religion in 1934 to five hundred Christian ministers, of the five hundred, fifty-four percent, or two hundred and ninety-five, said there would be no judgment day… . Twenty-six percent or 130 of the five hundred ministers were opposed to the Deity of Jesus. What in the world could the devil, the enemy of all righteousness, desire more than to make our young people think that chastity is outmoded? To accomplish this, he must make them believe there is no devil, and that there is not hell or judgment day. Thus ‘he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.’ I read an article in the newspaper at the close of the war [WWII] indicating that in Germany there were thirteen thousand illegitimate babies whose fathers were American boys!” (LeGrand Richards, Conference Report, Oct. 1949, pp. 51-54)

Latter-Day Commentary on the Book of Mormon

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