There’s a talk by L. Tom Perry in the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1976 general conference that anyone who is interested in our recent posts on freedom and agency should also be interested in. We’ve been saying that consequences are keys to agency. No consequences, no agency. Brother Perry taught that too, but as one having authority.

Brother Perry spends a lot of time talking about the orderliness of creation and the predictability of divine law, without which meaningful choice of meaningful consequences would be impossible. He teaches that our choices ultimately have to be anchored or oriented towards that divine order, because it is only that order that makes them possible in the first place. To choose against that order is to embrace self-contradiction.

Here’s a line relevant to some of our recent discussions on educating for freedom:

Because all that they would ever need had been supplied them, it was now possible to hold them accountable for their mortal performance.