Excerpt from Improvement Era, Vol. 25: May, 1922

Just what, then, does this quickening of the body mean, translated into terms of everyday living?

Let us first try to sense in a general way the tremendous fact of our having been made temporal (or mortal). When we compare the freedom of movement in pre-existence, - as sug gested in our Savior's revelation to Nephi, that on the morrow he was to be born in Bethlehem some twelve thousand miles eastward - with what happens to our spirits the moment we are born, that is to say, the moment we become subject to tem poral conditions, we should realize without the need of scrip tural assurance, the fact that Adam fell, that we are all fallen. No fact could possibly be more emphatic than this. Let us next proceed to examine this fall in terms of the essential attributes of matter. Summed up we shall find that it means a kind of imprisonment, and that salvation means fighting our way outward and upward to freedom.

The first condition of this imprisonment is due to Mass or Weight, in other words, to the fact that our spirits become sub ject to the law of gravitation, through being tied down to a body of mortal matter. At first the bondage is all but complete: as infants our limbs are as lead. Little by little the dynamic spirit ual being within gets control - fights its way out: we creep, we walk, we run, we climb, we change these leaden limbs to bundles of nerves, the livest stuff in mortal creation. Associated with every victory over the inertia of mass or weight, are scintilla tions of the radiant energy within, and these scintillations.

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