Lately I’ve been having arguments in my sleep. Yes, I am as disturbed by this as you are. In the last few days I had an argument with my sister about whether some incident from our youth had happened or not (curiously, I was arguing that it had not, but in my dream was worried that it had because it reflected discredit on me. When I finally woke up, I realized that the whole incident was imaginary). Last night I also had an argument with John Derbyshire about Mormonism. He pooh-poohed religion. I testified that someone would be much better off as a Mormon than raised with his beliefs. He conceded the point, but then argued that the same would be true of any belief system other than secularism, that there was a hole in the human operating system that just needed something plugged into it other than malign progressivism, and that practically anything would do. The discussion went on from there.

Worse than the fact that I am having arguments in my sleep is that I am not always winning them decisively.

So this morning I woke up early and decided to read some talks from the Saturday morning session of the October 1972 conference. I had procrastinated reading them.

The two I read were Brother Romney on Why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? and Brother Hunter’s talk on the spiritual famine that exists in the world.

These are not coincidences.

Here is Brother Romney:

As to man’s relationship to God, Joseph learned from a subsequent revelation that the inhabitants of “the worlds” (including those of us on this earth) “are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” (D&C 76:24.)

These fundamental truths concerning God and man’s relationship to him were not being taught by the churches of Joseph Smith’s day, for the obvious reason that they were neither known nor believed. It is true that they were known and taught and believed by members of the church of Christ in the days of Jesus and his apostles. But in 1830 an understanding of them had long since been lost. It was ignorance of a true knowledge of God and man’s relationship to him that spawned the many churches.

I repeat, my dream last night and these talks this morning are not coincidences. There is a power in our knowledge that we are the children of the Father, that our own families are sub species aeternitas, that peculiarly fits the the hunger and thirst of our times. It is divine knowledge.