--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 32 number: 6 published: 1929-04 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "*Improvement Era* 32, no. 6 (April 1929). Salt Lake City: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, April 1929." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3206unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera3206unse curator_note: Internet Archive issue scan; advertising and unpaginated plates omitted. rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1929-04) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3206unse publication_year: 1929 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1929, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Improvement Era, April 1929 Improvement Era Vol. XXXII APRIL, 1929 No. 6 The Veil: Its Uses and Abuses By Professor N. L. Nelson II. ITS HUMAN ABUSES IN a previous article, it was maintained that the power to look behind the Veil is innate in every child of God sent to this lower world to finish his divine education; but that it is an occulted or static faculty, and one evidently intended by our Father in heaven to remain dormant during earth life, save as he himself quickens it, in prophet or seer, to put over the mortal horizon some message for the good of mankind. At the same time, so it was also pointed out, he does not leave us without guide in the darkness of mortality; some light, some echo, some infinite refrain, of the life that was and the life that is to be, gets across or through the Veil to each of us. Respecting the life that was, situations constantly arise which are apparently new, yet strangely familiar; faces, voices, ideas, seem to stir up, as it were, memories of that previous life. As Zion's poet has said: "Yet oft-times a secret something Whispered, 'You're a stranger here,' And I felt that I had wandered From a more exalted sphere." The same sort of submerged reminiscence led the poet Words- worth to exclaim: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us — our life's star — Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." Outside the glimpses we obtain in scripture, the Veil in the East (pre-existence)has had few interpreters, though many have done violence to it.