Teacher Ouyang was a kind of surrogate parent to me. His art was so pure as to be transparent, but I now see that he was in fact an extraordinarily gifted teacher who took his work very seriously. He told us this himself in one of his fables, though of course we had not ears to hear.

There once was a crooked doctor. He would take money from people, then give them false medicine. Sometimes the medicine was poisonous and the patient died.

In the natural course of things the doctor himself left this world at last and found himself standing in judgment before Lord Yan-Wang, the emperor of hell. It is difficult to imagine any crimes worse than yours, said Lord Yan-Wang. When people were suffering and helpless they placed their trust in you and paid you with silver and gold. You repaid them with poison and death! Eighteenth level! [In our old Taoist religion there were eighteen levels in hell, the deepest levels for the worst sinners.]

Well, there was the poor doctor—though of course we should not feel very much compassion for him—down on the eighteenth level, resting up between tortures, crying out in remorse for his evil life, when he heard a knocking from below. Then very faintly he heard a voice coming up from beneath the floor of his dungeon: Who are you? What crime did you commit to be immured so deep in hell? The doctor was astonished. He had never heard that there were more than eighteen levels in hell; yet here, apparently, was a nineteenth level! Placing his mouth close to the floor he called down: I was a false doctor! But what great crime did you commit, that you have been banished to a level so deep it has never been known to men? Came the answer: False teacher!

-John Derbyshire, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream

Or as another friend of mine said, it is great wickedness to give a youth a false model for life or a false life script.

When I was a kid, our kindergarten made up one of those recipe books where we kids contributed the recipe.  Mine was for cookies and called for two cups salt.  No one ever made that recipe, thankfully, though not for lack of me wheedling.  But later in life I managed to make more than one set of cookies where I read baking powder for baking soda, or rather the other way around.  Well, that can happen.  Inexperienced cooks can have trouble following a recipe.  But they can fix their mistake next time if the recipe is right.  If the recipe is right.

Some folks think that stories are an excellent excuse to dress up a moral.  Some folks think that morals are an excellent excuse to tell a story.  I’m with the latter bunch.  Stories teach the moral better than the moral does.

But both camps are in luck, because I’m about to give you a story and a moral from Elder Packer, all rolled into one package:

Before Eleanor Sayers Harman died, she gave all of her funds to her daughter Edith and counseled her to go to America.

Edith had been cast out by her husband when she joined the Church. She and eight-year-old Nellie left England with the flimsy assurance that a missionary thought his family in Idaho might take them in until they could be located.

Nellie was my wife’s mother; Edith, her grandmother. I knew them well. They were women of special nobility.

Our lineage runs also to the stately manor houses of England, well-connected with the courts of kings, where culture and plenty were much in evidence.

But the dignity and worth of those forebears is not more, and may well be less, than that of Eleanor Sayers.

Sarah and Eleanor, Edith and Nellie—all were women of a special nobility—the royalty of righteousness. We want our children to remember that their lineage runs to the poorhouse in Pullham, Norfolk, and to remember this: It is the misapprehension of most people that if you are good, really good, at what you do, you will eventually be both widely known and well compensated.

It is the understanding of almost everyone that success, to be complete, must include a generous portion of both fame and fortune as essential ingredients.

The world seems to work on that premise. The premise is false. It is not true. The Lord taught otherwise.

I want you, our children, to know this truth:

You need not be either rich or hold high position to be completely successful and truly happy.

In fact, if these things come to you, and they may, true success must be achieved in spite of them, not because of them.

Anyone who tells you that you will be a mortal success in riches or fame if you do thus or so is giving you a false life script.  Anyone who tells you that someone owes you mortal success is giving you a false life script.  Anyone who tells you that your mortal success or failure determines your worth is giving you a false life script.

This world is full of entropy.  It is a world of scarcity and limits.  It has to be for us to make meaningful choices.  Which means that at most half of us can be above average.

The life to come differs from this one in that everyone there can succeed and can succeed fabulously.  The right life script now is the one that best prepares you for then, because that is where the action is.  Preparing for success in that life may include trying for success in this one and succeeding, or failing, it is all one.

Other Posts from the Saturday Afternoon session of the October 1980 General Conference

• It shall save thy own by Marilyn Nielson