“In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions”

IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS/' BY JOEL NIBLEY, LOGAN, UTAH.

To us, living in the most highly civilized, and most enlightened age the world has ever seen, it is quite impossible to understand the almost total intellectual darkness into which the people of the Middle Ages fell. Truths which are clear as can be to us were to them often clouded and sometimes entirely obscured by their ab- surd superstitions and ignorance. And some of the truths are not to this day wholly free from the crust of error they received while traveling through that unwholesome period. Long before the time of Christ, the more important nations of the world, such as Greece and Rome, had had their religions. Those people were very imaginative and poetical, and their forms of religion, though not the truest kinds, were often fanciful and sometimes beautiful. When, however, Christianity became the world's religion, partly because of its intrinsic worth and partly because the emperors saw it as a tool to accomplish their political purposes, some of the smartest men undertook to bring about a reconciliation between it and the older religions of the world. The result was most disastrous. The doctrines of Christ, which hitherto had been uncorrupted, were now tainted with pagan mythology, and it was not long before the beauty of both systems was lost. Not only were the finer parts of the gospel changed, but even the forms of the ordinances. Thus, it is not difficult to see how the true idea of heaven was lost to men; and how, in later times, it has gone through an evolution from a barbarous to a more human conception, though being still far from divine. It is, indeed, to us a very mournful picture, — this o£.heaven

602 IMPROVEMENT ERA.

— where one may find rest, after having lived a most vicious and wicked life, through an hour before death having permitted the sprinkling of a few drops of water upon one's head; yet, where he will be denied who has weighed the balance to his damnation, by so much as a single misdeed, and who must suffer the most ex- cruciating torments throughout all eternity, and can never regain what, through the thoughtlessness of perhaps one moment, he has lost. But to the saints has been revealed a thought which is

becoming the essence of the intelligence of this age. It is that there are different degrees of glory in heaven; one glory which is compared in brightness to the sun; another, to the moon; and still another, to the stars. And these are divided and sub-divided until we have a place for every person who has lived upon the earth, except those who are called the "sons of perdi- tion." We understand the state of man's happiness after death to be due entirely to the harmony or discord that exists within his own bosom. That as no two men are constituted alike, either in char- acter or disposition, their acts will necessarily be unlike, and the inexorable law of justice demands that a man's place in this uni- verse be determined by his deeds; that he stand upon his own merit; that my neighbor, having lived, perhaps, a better life than I have lived, will enjoy the greater happiness. And so it goes with the world. This is so plain and beautiful that we really do not understand how anyone could entertain a different view. It is when, and only when, we place it in contradistinction to the old idea, that we can understand how beautiful, how literal, and how true are the words of our Lord when he said: "In my father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go ta prepare a place for you."