“Be Ye Clean”

IMPROVEMENT ERA. Vol. XIII. AUGUST, 1910. No 10. "Be Ye Clean.'" BY DR. GEORGE H. BRIMHALL, PRESIDENT OP THE BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY. My brethren and sisters, I believe in self-reliance; I believe in a certain amount of independence; but I do not believe that self-reliance segregated from everything else is of much value. I do not think my self-reliance to breathe is of much value if I eliminate my dependence upon a supply of something to breathe. I do not believe that my self-reliance to see amounts to very much standing off by itself, and no stimulus furnished me from elsewhere. This ego, this suggestive existence is a very small thing to boast over. I want your faith and your prayers; I want to be dependent upon my Father in heaven, so exercise your faith and prayers for me. I am here for you, tonight; you are not here for me. The Church is for you. This beautiful world is for the people who are in it. The gospel is for you. It would be a gospel if none of you lived. It is not so much a question of you being for the institution, as the institution being for you. "Be ye clean," has been assigned me as a topic. Who said it? It is put in quotation marks. My Father in heaven, your *An address delivered at the closing session of the annual M. I. A. Conference, June 5, 1910, at the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

866 IMPROVEMENT ERA. Father in heaven said it and handed it down to us, through the dispensations, reiterating it to the Prophet Joseph. Cleanliness, courage and industry characterize a successful life. I mean courage to do what we know to be right, and courage to seek the greatest avenues of right — God's avenues. Where else do I hear the proclamation, "Be ye clean?" To whom am I addressing this text? To young Israel; to men and women the issue of the cleanest fountains of life that the ages have produced— the Josephs of modern Israel. I am speaking to a class of men and women, youths and maidens, who have been put in the midst of environments all of which are saying, Be ye clean. If I cast my eyes upward, the Italian skies smile back upon ire, and it seems as if they say to my soul, Be ye clean. These mountain peaks, capped with the symbol of purity, the white snow, looking down upon us from the time we were born, are saying with the silent influence of their majesty and their purity, Be ye clean. The mountain rills, that come leaping from the canyons and sparkle in their clearness, seem to say, Be ye clean. The wind that blows, coming from the grass-covered mountains, or the pineclad hills, in all its freshness seems to say — no, not seems to say, it does say to your soul and to mine, Be ye clean. It purifies my blood, and invigorates my whole being. Then, if I gaze upon myself, or if I look upon one of you — the human form, with its contour, its symmetry, filled with intelligence, this individual says, Be ye clean. I heard an eminent physician, not long since, speaking about keeping the body clean, and he said to the students: "How sweet we feel when we are clean ! How the very fragrance of cleanliness is invigorating! There is nothing so sweet as a clean babe, with all its innocence." But there is another field to which I turn — the soul-craving, the yearning for cleanliness, the thirst for righteousness. If I turn t) my own soul, and you to yours, if it is not a corrupted soul, we find a something in here which says, Be ye clean. Then, if this be true, why give such a subject as this for our conference? I will take the liberty of reading a clipping from our newspaper — I say our newspaper, because if I can have but one newspaper, this is the one I shall have, because it is the cleanest one. I find that, by reading this paper, I am posted

"BE YE CLEANS 867 fairly well, with my neighbors, on the current events of the age. I find that, through its columns, I form an acquaintance with the hourly news of the day, comparatively with my friends with whom I converse. I find that it is a peer, as a periodical, to the best periodicals; and 1 find that its editorial pages sparkle with the things that help me as a father, help me as a teacher, help me as a man. It is one of the factors of social and individual cleanliness. I have reference to the Deseret News. I do not hear very much about it; it does not need talking about, but I come back again to the first proposition — the Deseret News, perchance, does not need me, but I need it; my household needs it; the school with which I am connected needs it. I will read this clipping, from a recent editorial in the News: A little book has just been published by the Vir Publishing company, Philadelphia, which should be widely read. It is called Letters of a Physician to his Daughters, and it treats on "the great black plague," a subject on which too little is generally known. The author is Dr. F. A. Rupp. His aim is to enlighten the young people on the awful dangers to which they are exposed through the existence of the "social evil.'1 His language is plain, and some of the facts he relates are awful, but the little book can be read by the most fastidious. The author claims that about 72 per cent of the adult male population is unfit, on account of a certain disease, to be husbands and fathers, and that thousands of innocent girls are every year contaminated, broken in health and sent to their graves. He warns unsuspecting girls against these conditions. It is a subject of which little is ever said, in public or in print, but it is evident that the time has come for a friendly warning to the young people. The conditions in the world are such that, for the sake of coming generations, no less than ourselves, it becomes necessary to make war upon "the black plague," with all the means at our disposal. I was not startled at reading this, because I had taken pains to confidentially converse with physicians concerning conditions, and I was told by one, and it was verified by another, in brief, that the graduating physicians abroad are told to take no chances when they go to a home where a new birth is expected — take no chances, but always treat the eyes of the child at its birth! Then he gave me the per cents. I will not quote them here, because I

868 IMPROVEMENT ERA. think you are ready to say, "Talk cleanliness; the world has filth enough that we must meet and endure." You and I needed no treatment of that kind! There was no necessity of cautioning the accoucheurs in our homes to protect us from the probability of having our little eyes filled, at birth, with that which would put them out. Ah! the Jews understood something about these things when they said, ''Master, who has sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" But we were born of an ancestry that put us on the plain of life unhandicapped, that we might survive among the fittest of men. Today I met a woman from the south, and she said: "My father was a wonderful man. He has a posterity of over two hundred, and not one of them is deformed." Of those two hundred descendants of that man, there is not one that is deficient in any faculty; he is but a type of many of the founders of this commonwealth. I suppose I might tell you of some things you already know. One of them is this: You must exist, there is no escaping from existence, and you must, with myself, be subject to law. If I will not obey high law, I must come under the penalty of low law. If I will not keep the law of cleanliness, then I must come under the law of un cleanliness. We cannot escape it, either individually or communitively. The law is after every one of us — silently, searchingly making its demands. I want to relate a circumstance or two on this question of personal cleanliness. An eminent physician said to me, the other night, on the train, "Do you remember such and such a young man?" I replied, "I do; and I knew his father. His father was a very prominent man in educational and political circles." "Well," he said, "I was that man's classmate. He could get his geometry with a half hour's effort; his language was but a plaything to him; and he walked right through Latin, while I plodded and plodded. We loved each other; we hunted and fished together; we associated together among our friends. I scarcely had a brother that I loved as I loved him. He knew my heart; I thought I knew his. We graduated together. One day he came to me and said, calling me by name, 'Let us go to such a place tonight.' And I asked him, 'Why? What for?' 'Oh,' he said, 'you will learn what for. You have not tasted the sweet fruits of life

" BE YE CLEAN:1 868 yet; come on.' I said, 'Explain;' and he told me where he was going and what he was going for. I turned to him and said, 'My friend, no other man have I loved more than you; no other man has been knitted to my soul by the bonds of companionship more closely than you; but henceforth please do not acknowledge me as an acquaintance. You have been where I can never go. I have my manhood; I have the purity of my boyhood; now we part." And they parted. The man who had tasted these "sweets of life" and sought to befriend his companion by luring him there, went east to school; and for the first year he made a record. The next year his memory failed him; "and the sequence was," said my friend on the train, "he died in a hospital." "That is a sporadic case, doctor," I said. "It represents a type, a whole class of men," he said. The wages of sin is death. Now what took place in this sad case? It was a happy thing for the man and the community that he did die, that he was gone. Nature blotted him out, as far as an earthly individual is concerned. She did more than that, she blotted him out as a perpetuator of his race. I do not know whether he will want individual, eternal life or not, but he can't escape it — I mean individual, eternal existence; he can't escape that; but I do not think he can have eternal life in the sense that you and I can enjoy it, because eternal life means eternal liberty; it means eternal love; it means eternal labor; it means eternal progress. He cannot have it as you and I can have it, because he is loaded down, bowed in spirit, filthy still; as the Prophet Alma says, "Do not think that the resurrection is the restoration of impurity to purity; that which is filthy will be filthy still; ' indicating that a process of purification must go on after death. The character of all characters that I admire is Joseph that was sold into Egypt. He, it seems to me, was the most rounded character I ever read of. He must have been a perfect type of physical vigor, and he must have been a high type of intellectual vigor, else the great landowner of Egypt would not have trusted him, and he would not have been put as an overseer in the prison cell. He must have been a wonderful type of moral vigor and strength to stand true to his master, true to his trust, true to

870 IMPROVEMENT ERA. himself. I know that he was a high type of spiritual vigor, because when the king was troubled he came out with boldness, saying that interpretations belong to God, and then with selfreliance, reinforced by a reliance on the Lord — and that comes only through spirituality — he said, "God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace." That is an all-around man — physically, morally, intellectually and spiritually vigorous. The other day I was coming from the south in an automobile. The owner of it was handling it, and his wife, who was sitting behind, said, calling him by name: "Something is the matter with this machine The valves are not working equally; you have lost a spark some vrli ere." The man threw on the extra force of the gasoline, and sought to clear the eigine, but it would not clear, and he said, "I believe there is a dead spark." He got out. I wanted to learn something about automobiles, so I got out, too. He lifted the cover and he took one of the plugs out — cr, first, he took a steel screw-driver and held it near to the little rod that ran up beside one of these plugs. As he touched it, an electric spark flew to the screw-driver, and he said, "Alive." He touched the next one. There was a spark. He said, "That one's alive and all right." As he put his screwdriver near the third one there was a faint response. He said, "Half dead." He put his screw-driver to the next one — no response. He said, "Dead." He went back to the box and took a new plug. He unscrewed the dead plug and screwed the new one in its place. He unscrewed the half-dead plug, then took a brush and a little — something like a toothpick— and began to pick at the plug and brush it. By this time I said, "Well, what made that one weak?" "Dirt," he said. "Oh," I said, "that was what killed the last one?" He said, "Sure. Sometimes, when we get a faint, weak plug, we can clean it up and go on; but if it gets very dirty we have to unscrew it and put in a new one." Well, the whole thing was preaching me a sermon. I once heard President George Q. Cannon speaking from this stand to the young people on "The causes of apostasy, " and he

"BE YE CLEAN." 87 1 gave uncleanliness, — he called it unchastity — as one of the causes of apostasy. Do you know that we have the word of the Eternal that a filthy man, an unchaste man, one who persists in it and does not repent in sack-cloth and ashes, shall deny the faith? It is an absolute, fixed penalty. A man that will undertake to be unclean and remain in this Church, is attempting to make Deity a falsifier. Dirty sparks — dying sparks— dead sparks. The Josephs were not all sent to Egypt, brethren and sisters; there are many Josephs in Israel today. I want to talk cleanliness to you. I will tell you a story of one of our young men that went to Germany, a perfect Apollo" in physique, and he was marked as a victim by beauty and wealth. He found himself locked in a room, on a railroad train, with one of his pursuers, a charming creature, and he said to me: "Why, Brother Brimhall, you don't know how my blood boiled. At first I was simply disgusted, but the allurements, and the cunning, and the blandishments, and the taunts — at times taunting me as not being a man — were hard to endure. Every fiber of my being was burning with passion; and" he said, "do you know what happened? Vividly came back the words of Apostle John Henry Smith, which he spoke to me when I left for Europe. It seemed that I could see him standing right before me, and feel the pressure of his parting grasp; and I was lifted into an atmosphere of purity, so that I would have died before I would have yielded to the temptations without, or the clamoring within." Another young man who went west for an education, and who is quite an eminent professor, said: ' 'Mormonism' saved me when I was out in the world. The words of Joseph Smith, that I had read, saved me. I was in the swim, rushing along down the social current, and I came to a place where I was face to face with temptation, and these words came to me: 'A man who commits adultery cannot enter the celestial kingdom of God.' I had read that, and I believed it, and it kept me from falling." I speak of this that you may know what influence the gospel has upon men, and how it rescues them. Oh, is it possible that a class of young people who are taught as you and I have been

872 IMPROVEMENT ERA. taught— that keeping clean is as much a necessity as keeping alive — is it possible that we can ever prostitute our purity! I remember a case of parents saying to their son, "Now, you are going on a mission. We are glad you are worthy. We expect you to do your duty and return, but we would rather you came back to us in a coffin than to come back to us unclean." We, as a people, are taught that next to murder is unchastity; and that is philosophic. The man who kills his fellow man, unlawfully, moves the spirit world; he has created conditions that demand an entrance into the spirit world; and he has no authority of law for doing it. And the person who creates physical conditions that require the moving of the heavens towards the earth, with no authority of law behind the act, has unlawfully disturbed the physical and the spiritual universe. Oh, my brethren and sisters, happy, happy is the father and the mother who can take their first-born, and all their children, and say, "You are the product of law and love!" I speak of the law of God, not only in our Church — for we have the law of God, it is the law of God for eternity, — but people outside the Church may have the law of God, to them, for this life. Is it possible that a man will take advantage of a woman's weakness? Why not take the advantage of the weakness of her arm and strike the blow, because you are stronger? Have virtuous boys and you will have chaste girls everywhere. I heard a woman, one time from this stand, years ago, say that in primitive time man pursued woman as the hawk pursues the dove. Well, it is too much so now. There are men in this enlightened age who talk about woman being the legitimate prey of man — but not Latter-day Saints, not real men. Let me tell you what happened in a court, in a celebrated case. I will just quote the words of the attorney; they impressed me very forcibly. It was a case where a fallen woman had killed a vile man. It had been a long drawn out case; I will not name it here, if I did, you would remember it. The attorney said, "The brute in hici called, and the brute in her answered." We speak about having spirit in our veins, in the resurrection. Why, we need spirit in our veins now, to control this blood that is in our veins. The brute is not to lead the man, and it is wrong, in one respect, to call it brute, because it is the image of God, but

"BE YE CLEAN:' 873 it may become brutish. It is an awful thing to call a man a brute, but if he lets these lower impulses guide him and direct him. what is he? He is subject to the lower or animal nature; he is worse lhan the brute, lower than the brute, because he is a man underneath the brute. Why shall we not protect them — our sisters? They are jewels in our care; are we knights or cravens? Let me tell you, girls, no man is capable — I am speaking psychologically— no man is capabe of properly loving a woman whose virtue he has not had a regard for. After he has despoiled her, I do not care what compensation he may make, he is psychologically incapable of loving her as he would have loved her had he followed the lines of the law and of humanity, and not the cravings of animality. History is full of incidents to prove this, and science is conclusive on that point. Now, girls, you might remember this: don't cheapen your charms. Do you remember the story of the old grocer who, when a fellow came up to his store and began taking hold of the fruit, said, "Begone with you?" The fellow thought the old grocer was rather surly, and said, "Why, we might want to buy some peaches;" and the old man replied, "A peach that everybody handles, nobody wants to buy." (Laughter.) So, girls, don*t cheapen your charms. There are things that strengthen us in the line of being clean, aside from what we have been born to. Among these are clean books, clean associates. I heard a man say, the other day, at our commencement exercises, a very intellectual man who was speaking to the graduates, how they were to be responsible for what they did in this world, and he said, "I have been trying for fifty years to overcome a song I heard when I was a boy." I say to you, oh, have regard for boyhood! If you cannot regard your God, if you cannot regard yourself, your fatherhood, your mother sentiment, regard the boy, and never sing aught but purity in his presence, nor tell a story that is filled with unclean thoughts, lest you be held guilty of corrupting an innocent soul. We, many of us, know how these things hang on to us. There is a place in Spanish Fork canyon that I cannot pass today without an old vulgar jingling coming into my ears. I was riding up the canyon, one day, with Dr. M. H. Hardy — there was a man whose life was a

874 IMPROVEMENT ERA. > sermon in cleanliness and courage — and I said to him, "Doctor when we get up there, that old thing is going to rise up." "You know how to get rid of it?" he said. "Yes, I have been thinking of it." As we rode up, there was the maple tree under which the camp-fire had been built, twenty-five years before that time. Around that camp-fire crouched, with the rain pouring down on the quilts, the men — no, the males, — who sang that vulgar song to me and the other boys. Well, as we approached that old campground there, the jingle of that song began, and the unclean suggestions came back to me, and I called out, so loud that it echoed over the hills, the names of "Nephi!" "Joseph!" and at once my mind was filled with revelations of the deeds of these noble characters, and suddenly the vile images and suggestions skulked off to the corners of forgetfulness; evil was overcome with good, and Satan was cast out. Lives of great men are calling, "Be clean!" I want to tell you what else calls to me: The wrecks of my acquaintances, the ruined lives, the darkened souls of men that I have known are looking up and saying, "Oh, be clean! Be clean!" The ruins of prostitute and decayed nations are calling to you and to me, all down the corridors of time, saying to us, as a community, and saying to the young people of this century, "Be clean! Be clean!" The words of my mother are echoing in my ears — the words she wrote me at a mining camp, saying, "my boy, be clean! be clean!" The eyes of my children, the confiuing gaze of my wife, the sweet, innocent look of the students I meet, and my brethren and sisters, are all saying, "Be clean!" And, oh, 1 thank God that I have been preserved! I thank my Father that I have escaped unscathed! What would I be if I had to keep my soul, all the time, a secret that I dare not divulge to my complement, and be conscious that if she knew what I knew about myself she would regret having become mine! Wnatmust a lover feel, when he is forced to realize that if his sweetheart knew what he knows about himself she would never marry him! A fair deal in courtship is made possible only by cleanliness, or by open confession. One thing more: The lives of my brethren with whom I asso-

"BE YE CLEAN:' 875 ciate, the brethren in our home circles and the brethren here, and especially the whole lives of the general authorities of the Church, are calling to me and saying, "Be clean! Be clean!" The cleanliness of their words and works at home and abroad proclaim cleanliness of character. I wish to testify with all the power I have, with all the hopes I have of meeting it here and hereafter, that the feeling, the spirit and the atmosphere that surround the brethren, the leaders of this people, breathe cleanliness and courage. And, further, that great and good men of the world testify to the same thing. God bless you and this work — this glorious work! May he help us to keep our family name clean, help us to keep the name of this Church clean, and help — oh, not help, but do keep ourselves clean, that we may not be required to walk the earth, or go into the eternities of the spirit world loaded down with uncleanliness — is my prayer, in the name of Jesus. Amen. Come, Gather to Zion. (For the Improvement Era.) Out on life's sea where the tempest is raging, A wand'rer is drifting so sad and alone, And over the billows the Savior is calling And earnestly bidding the wand'rer come home. Come, gather to Zion, ye humble and lowly, No longer in darkness ye wander alone, The elders of Israel are the gospel proclaiming, And bringing God's children to Zion, their home. Come, ye that are weary and burdened with sorrow; Come, ye young and ye old, ye feeble and blind; . Yes, come unto Zion, your home in the mountains, And partake of the blessings of Jesus so kind. Come, ye honest in heart, and receive the glad message : The Savior has spoken from heaven once more, Restored the true gospel in his tender mercy, Come, gather to Zion, and rejoice evermore! Eugene A. Rooch. Mt. Carmel, Utah.