Vicarious Service

Vicarious Service BY ALICE LOUISE REYNOLDS, OF THE BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY One Sunday morning, while attending church in one of our well-known American college towns, the minister delivering the sermon said, in substance : Is it not a shock to the intelligence of any thinking person to be asked to believe that one person can die for the sins of another? How can the death of another possibly affect my sins? I must overcome my own sins ; all such matters are entirely personal. To reason otherwise is comparable to the reasoning of the Indian who killed the first white man he came in contact with, because some other white man had killed an Indian. That evening I attended another church, and the minister ol this church said : There are persons who scoff at the idea of one suffering and dying for another, yet such is the way of life. We make oui advent into the world through the suffering of another, and oft times the birth-pangs bring death. I shall go still further with this latter argument, to meet a class of people in and out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, who insist that work for the dead is ineffective, because it is vicarious. I would remind people who hold this point of view, that we receive our bodies vicariously. On this side our vision is clear, and we accept it without thought as the only way. Fancy spirits, in the pre-existent state, refusing to come to this earth because of themselves they cannot clothe the spirit with flesh and blood. Imagine their insisting that no development could come to them under such conditions. Is it not likely that persons who object to a vicarious atonement, as well as work for the dead, are equally as inconsistent as a spirit would be refusing the mortal body in God's own appointed way? It is, we think, vastly better to take the poet Browning'? view of matters, when he wrote : "Perfect I call Thy plan ; Maker, remake, complete, — T trv?t What thou shalt do!" PPOVO, UTAH