Not long ago, some weeks ago, I received a letter from a Canadian boy in England. He said in part:
Will you promise to do something for me when and if you manage to get to Edmonton this summer? Will you go to my home and see my mother and talk about me a little? She likes me a lot, and she likes to talk about me to someone else. Since you may be in Edmonton, and especially if something has happened to me by that time, you could gratify this little trait of hers. With love, Roy.
And just a month ago there came to my desk in the tortured handwriting of a grief-stricken mother this letter:
Mr. Smith, Roy has gone. Please will you say a sermon for him?
Roy was not a member of the Church. He was a boy of great talent, a boy of great promise, and he is gone as thousands of others are going, killed in battle.
What sermon shall we say for Roy, together with the thousands of our own boys and the tens of thousands of others who are his companions in death? Shall we extol his virtues and praise his talents, or shall we berate our enemies and castigate the war lord? Neither panegyric nor denunciation will give to the world the pictures Roy might have painted, nor the sons he might have reared. What shall we say?
We need in these days of a sick world the treatment prescribed by the Great Physician. We have his diagnosis, and we have it constantly reiterated by the Lord’s prophets.
– Joseph F. Smith (Patriarch to the Church; grandson of President Joseph F. Smith), April Conference, 1945
Wow, that was powerful. Thanks.
I know a man who was a great “hater” of our enemies during World War 2. His first son was called to be a missionary in Germany and the second son to Japan. I thought about him while reading the second paragraph: “shall we berate our enemies and castigate the war lord?” I think one of the treatments prescribed by the Great Physician is to have our children called to serve in far off lands and learn to love those people, and then bring that love home.