"Be Not Afraid, Only Believe"

President Gordon B. Hinckley

President of the Church

CES Fireside for Young Adults

9 Sept 2001

My dear young friends, we are gathered tonight in this great Conference Center and in
numerous Church halls elsewhere. There must be hundreds of thousands of you. It is a
stimulating experience and a tremendous challenge to be with you. It is a wonderful
opportunity to speak with you.

I may repeat tonight some things I’ve said before. But I’m not going to give you the six
"B’s" that I gave your younger brothers and sisters a year ago, which have since been
memorized by many and even set to music. Maybe I’ll get out a book someday on these
because I believe the youth of the whole nation could profit from their observance. The
difficulty I have in doing such things was expressed by Madame Curie long ago. She
said: "So little time. So much to do." And that’s your problem also: "So little time. So
much to do."

I am told that you are eighteen to thirty years of age. Oh, to be eighteen or twenty-five
or thirty again! You can do anything when you’re that age. I am three times thirty, plus
one. But I have not lost interest in you, your problems, or your great opportunities.

No Fear Concerning the Future

The world is full of naysayers who think that people your age have lost their way. I
disagree. Let me say that I am very proud of you. I think you are the finest generation
this Church has ever produced. Because of you, I have no fear concerning the future.
You are ambitious. You are trustworthy. You are loyal to the Church and its principles.
You have great confidence in one another. You work together with love and
appreciation and respect one for another. You are faithful, and you are true. You love
the Lord, and you pray.

Do you have problems? Of course you do. You have many problems. Many of you
worry about what to do with your lives, how you will earn a living. Many of you worry
about marriage, about having a good companion who will love you and whom you will
love. You will look forward to the time when you will have children and hope within
yourselves that you will be good fathers and mothers.

You face problems that at times seem insurmountable. You try to find a way out but
only become frustrated. You pray about these matters. But you don’t seem to get the
answers you seek.

You live in a world of loose moral standards. You have been taught one thing by your
parents and the Church, and you see another thing often practiced by those who seem to
succeed and do well.
Most of you have held to high standards. Possibly some few of you have slipped. I
would like to say that I assure you that even if this is the case, you have not lost
everything. With sincere repentance on your part, the Lord will forgive, and those about
you will forgive. I hope that you will somehow come to forgive yourselves and put your
trust and faith in the Lord, who will be kind and gracious to you. Already you’ve paid a
terrible price for your mistakes. They have haunted you day and night. They seem never
to leave you.

Confess them if that is necessary and then get them behind you. Parents and bishops
stand ready to help. Your bishops have been ordained and set apart and promised
wisdom beyond their own in working with you and assisting you. Isaiah said: "Though
your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool.

"If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land" (Isaiah 1:18–19).

Hold On to the Institute Program

Most of you are in school. Most of you are attending universities that are not Church
universities. While doing so, you attend institute.

Permit me to say that there is no way that all of you could be accommodated at BYU—
Provo, BYU—Idaho, BYU—Hawaii, or the LDS Business College. I wish that this
might be possible, but it cannot be. Please do not feel left out. Grasp the opportunity of
the moment wherever you may be. Love the school of your choice. Make it your dear
mother, your alma mater. Take from it the very best it has to offer. And hold on to the
institute program. Gather with your peers in these far-flung facilities.

Listen to good and able teachers. Participate in the social programs. Studies have shown
that you are as likely to marry in the temple if you do this as if you were at one of the
Church-owned schools. I pray that you will be blessed of the Lord, that you will receive
a good education, that you will find wonderful companionship, and that you will look
upon these days as among the most fruitful of your entire lives.

I do not downgrade the Church schools. They are tremendous institutions. I wish we
could build and maintain many more. But we cannot. They’re terribly expensive. I am
so glad that we have them, and I compliment those of you who are attending these
institutions. I myself did not attend Brigham Young University. I attended the
University of Utah and received there my baccalaureate degree. I have no regrets. As
chairman of the BYU Board of Trustees, I am grateful for our Church institutions, but I
am also grateful that there are opportunities elsewhere, many of them. The institute
program represents a very serious attempt on the part of the Church Board of Education
to see that our students have opportunities for religious training and Church association
wherever they may be.

And so God bless you, my dear young friends, wherever you are. You are doing that
which the Lord would have you do. Said He, "Seek ye out of the best books words of
wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith" (D&C 88:118).
Distinguish between Truth and Sophistry

You are engaged in an intense gathering of knowledge, the accumulated wisdom of all
of the ages of man. As members of this Church, ours must be a ceaseless quest for truth.
That truth must include both spiritual and religious truth as well as secular.

Joseph F. Smith, who served seventeen years as President of the Church, declared:

"We believe in all truth, no matter to what subject it may refer. No sect or religious
denomination in the world possesses a single principle of truth that we do not accept or
that we will reject. We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may
come; for truth will stand, truth will endure. No man’s faith, no man’s religion, no
religious organization in all the world, can ever rise above the truth" (Gospel Doctrine,
5th ed. [1939],1).

But you must distinguish between truth and sophistry. There can be a vast difference
between the two, and unless we are careful, we may find that we are believing in the
sophistry of man rather than the truth of God.

I read the newspapers. I read those who write syndicated columns. I occasionally listen
to the commentators on television and radio. These writers are brilliant. They are men
and women of incisive language, scintillating in expression. They are masters of the
written word. But for the most part their attitude is negative. Regardless of whom they
write about or speak about they seem to look for their failings and weaknesses. They are
constantly criticizing, seldom praising. This spirit is not limited to the columnists and
the commentators. Read the letters to the editor. Some of them are filled with venom,
written by people who seem to find no good in the world or in their associates.

Accentuate the Positive

Criticism, faultfinding, evil speaking—these are of the spirit of the day. To hear tell,
there is nowhere a man of integrity holding public office. All businessmen are crooks.
The utilities are out to rob you. Even on campus there is heard so much the snide
remark, the sarcastic jibe, the cutting down of associates—these, too often, are the
essence of our conversation. In our homes, wives weep and children finally give up
under the barrage of criticism leveled by abusive husbands and fathers. Criticism is the
forerunner of divorce, the cultivator of rebellion, sometimes the catalyst that leads to
failure. In the Church, it sows the seed of inactivity and finally apostasy.

I come to you tonight with a plea that we stop seeking out the storms and enjoy more
fully the sunlight. I am suggesting that as we go through life we try to "accentuate the
positive." I am asking that we look a little deeper for the good, that we still our voices of
insult and sarcasm, that we more generously compliment virtue and effort. Now I am
not asking that all criticism be silenced. Growth comes of correction. Strength comes of
repentance. Wise is the man or woman who can acknowledge mistakes pointed out by
others and change his or her course.

What I am suggesting is that you turn from the negativism that so permeates our modern
society and look for the remarkable good among those with whom you associate, that
we speak of one another’s virtues more than we speak of one another’s faults, that
optimism replace pessimism, that our faith exceed our fears. When I was a young man
and was prone to speak critically, my wise father would say: "Cynics do not contribute.
Skeptics do not create. Doubters do not achieve."

We are experiencing a serious economic downturn. You read of thousands of layoffs.

This may be a difficult season for you. You worry much about your personal affairs.
You worry about money. You worry about marriage. You worry about the future.

There may be some lean days ahead for some of you. There may be troubles. None of us
can avoid them all. Do not despair. Do not give up. Look for the sunlight through the
clouds. Opportunities will eventually open to you. I finished the University of Utah in
1932. It was the very bottom of the most serious depression of modern times. The
unemployment rate in Utah was then more than 30 percent. There was much of
cynicism. It was a time when men stood in soup lines, and some committed suicide in
despair. But somehow we managed to eat and keep going. Opportunities gradually
opened, first here and then there. In 1982, I spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of my
graduating class. I met there men and women who had become prominent in many
undertakings. They had begun almost in poverty. But they kept climbing upward. They
had become leaders. They had looked for the positive in life, praying with faith and
working with diligence.

No matter the circumstances, I encourage you to go forward with faith and prayer,
calling on the Lord. You may not receive any direct revelation. But you will discover as
the years pass that there has been a subtle guiding of your footsteps in paths of progress
and great purpose.

The growth of the Church gives us reason to be upbeat. In 1967 I received the
assignment to supervise the work in all of South America. I traveled back and forth over
that great continent many times. The work was weak everywhere. There were perhaps a
half dozen stakes in all of that part of the world. Now in the nation of Brazil alone there
are 188 stakes. In Mexico there are 197 stakes. It is difficult to believe, but it is a fact.

We shall likely see from now until the 2002 Olympics are behind us a great deal of
writing concerning the Church. Much of it is likely to be negative. Journalists may
mock that which to us is sacred. They may belittle that which we call divine. They may
accuse us of being opposed to intellectualism. They will in large measure overlook the
glory and the wonder of this work.

But I want to tell you that what they write will not injure us. We may be offended by it,
but the work will go forward. With their negative attitudes they will overlook the
wonder of the spark that was kindled in Palmyra, which is now lighting fires of faith
across the earth, in many lands and in many languages. They will have great difficulty
understanding us, because the Spirit of God is something that is foreign to them. With
their humanistic outlook, they will fail to realize that spiritual promptings, with
recognition of the influence of the Holy Ghost, are as potent and real a thing as any
other manifestation in this life.
George Santayana said:
O World, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
("O World Thou Choosest Not the Better Part," in Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D.
Richardson Jr., eds., Three Centuries of American Poetry: 1620–1923 [1999], 434.)

Looking to our history, our critics may see little of divinity in the great work of the
Prophet Joseph Smith and those associated with him. Were our forebears human? Of
course they were. They doubtless made some mistakes. Some of them acknowledged
making mistakes. But the mistakes were minor when compared with the marvelous
work that they accomplished. To highlight the mistakes and gloss over the greater good
is to draw a caricature. Caricatures are amusing, but they are often ugly and dishonest.
A man may have a wart on his cheek and still have a face of beauty and strength, but if
the wart is emphasized unduly in relation to his other features, the portrait is lacking in
integrity.

These early leaders made no pretense at being perfect. They recognized that there was
only one perfect man who ever walked the earth. The Lord has used imperfect people in
the process of building His perfect society. If some of them occasionally stumbled, or if
their characters were slightly flawed in one way or another, the wonder is the greater
that they accomplished so much.

Intellectualism

I wish to say a few words on intellectualism—that quality that some say we deny in our
work. A so-called scholar recently expressed the view that the Church is an enemy of
intellectualism. This strikes particularly at you people in your present circumstances. If
he meant by intellectualism that branch of philosophy that teaches "the doctrine that
knowledge is wholly or chiefly derived from pure reason" and "that reason is the final
principle of reality" (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language [1967],
"intellectualism," 738), then, yes, we are opposed to so narrow an interpretation as
applicable to religion.

Such an interpretation excludes the power of the Holy Spirit in speaking to and through
man. Of course we believe in the cultivation of the mind. The emphasis in the classes
you are taking in your various courses demands the cultivation of the mind and the use
of its powers. But the intellect is not the only source of knowledge. There is a promise,
given under the inspiration of the Almighty, set forth in these beautiful words: "God
shall give unto you knowledge by his holy Spirit, yea, by the unspeakable gift of the
Holy Ghost" (D&C 121:26).

The humanists who criticize us, the so-called intellectuals who demean us, speak only
from ignorance of this manifestation. They have not heard the voice of the Spirit. They
have not heard it because they have not sought after it and prepared themselves to be
worthy of it. Then, supposing that knowledge comes only of reasonings and of the
workings of the mind, they deny that which comes by the power of the Holy Ghost. The
things of God are understood by the Spirit of God. That Spirit is real. To those who
have experienced its workings, the knowledge so gained is as real as that received
through the operation of the five senses. I testify of this. I am confident that each of you
can testify of it. I urge you to continue throughout your lives to cultivate a heart in tune
with the Spirit. If you do so, your lives will be enriched. You will feel a kinship with
God our Eternal Father. You will taste the sweetness of joy that can be had in no other
way.

Do not be trapped by the sophistry of the world, which for the most part is negative and
which seldom, if ever, bears good fruit. Do not be ensnared by those clever ones whose
self-appointed mission it is to demean that which is sacred, to emphasize human
weakness, and undermine faith, rather than inspire strength. "Look to God and live"
(Alma 37:47).

Well did Jacob say long ago:

"O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the
foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken
not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves,
wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.

"But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God" (2 Nephi 9:28–29).

Walk with Faith

As you walk your various paths, walk with faith. Speak affirmatively and cultivate an
attitude of confidence. You have the capacity to do so. Your strength will give strength
to others. Do not partake of the spirit so rife in our times. Rather, look for good and
build upon it. There is so much of the strong and the decent and the beautiful to build
upon. You are partakers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel means "good news."
The message of the Lord is one of hope and salvation. The voice of the Lord is a voice
of glad tidings. The work of the Lord is a work of glorious accomplishment.

I am not suggesting that you simply put on rose-colored glasses to make the world about
you look better. I ask, rather, that you look above and beyond the negative, the cynical,
the critical, the doubtful, to the positive and the affirmative.

Some years ago I clipped an article on Commander William Robert Anderson, the man
who first took a submarine under the North Pole from the waters of the Pacific to the
waters of the Atlantic. It was an untried and dangerous mission. In his wallet he carried
a tattered card with these words: "I believe I am always divinely guided, I believe I will
always take the right road, I believe God will always make a way where there is no
way" (in Christopher S. Wren, "If It’s 3-to-1 against Anderson: Can a Congressman
Afford a Conscience?" Look, 20 Apr. 1971, 48).

In a dark and troubled hour, Jesus said, "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be
afraid" (John 14:27).

On one occasion the ruler of the synagogue came to Jesus pleading for help for his
dying daughter. While he yet spoke to the Master, those of the ruler’s house came and
said: "Thy daughter is dead: why troublest thou the Master any further?

"As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, he saith unto the ruler of the
synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe" (Mark 5:35–36).

I commend those tremendous words to you. Be not afraid, only believe.

Believe in God our Eternal Father, He who is greatest of all, who stands ever ready to
help us and who has the power to do so. Believe in Jesus Christ, the Savior and the
Redeemer of mankind, the worker of miracles, the greatest who ever walked the earth,
the Intercessor with our Father. Believe in the power of the Holy Ghost to lead, to
inspire, to comfort, to protect. Believe in the Prophet Joseph, as an instrument in the
hands of the Almighty in ushering in this the dispensation of the fulness of times.

Believe in the sacred word of God, the Holy Bible, with its treasury of inspiration and
sacred truth; in the Book of Mormon as a testimony of the living Christ. Believe in the
Church as the organization that the God of Heaven established for the blessing of His
sons and daughters of all generations of time.

Believe in yourselves as sons and daughters of God—men and women with unlimited
potential to do good in the world. Believe in personal virtue. There is no substitute for it
anywhere under the heavens. Believe in your power to discipline yourselves against the
evils that could destroy you. Believe in one another as the greatest generation ever yet to
live upon the earth.

I leave you my testimony of the truth of this work. I know it is true. I know that it is the
work of the Almighty. I bear witness of Him who is our Father and our God, of Him
who is our Lord and our Redeemer. I bear witness of the divine calling of the Prophet
Joseph and of those who have succeeded him in this high and holy office.

I pray the blessings of the Lord upon you, my beloved brothers and sisters. How much I
love you. I love you with all my heart. I pray for you. I plead with the Lord to bless you
with joy in your lives, with the strength to be virtuous, with the will to do what is right,
with capacity to learn things both secular and spiritual, with answers to your prayers as
you walk in righteousness, and I do it all in the sacred name of our Redeemer, even the
Lord Jesus Christ, amen.