It is not too much to affirm that the leaven of "Mormonism" is leavening the world and its theology. Every studious reader of recent commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, and of theological treatises in general, is aware of a surprising progressiveness in modern views of things spiritual, amounting in many instances to an abandonment of what were once regarded as the fundamentals of orthodoxy.
In the new theology "Mormonism" has pioneered the way.
In its early days the Church received the word of the Lord avouching the perpetuity of the organization. While no individual was promised that he should not fall away, and though the forfeiture of the Holy Spirit's companionship was specified as the sure and incalculable loss to all who wilfully persisted in sin, the blessed assurance was given that the Church of Jesus Christ was established for the last time, never to be destroyed, nor again driven from the earth through apostasy. Men may come and men may go, but the Church shall go on forever.
There has never been revision nor amendment in the fundamental law of the Church, and the only changes are those natural to development, expansion and adaptation to new conditions.
The world is full of sects and churches, and there is scarcely one that has not a counterpart in a revised or reformed or reorganized sect. But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no sect; it is an original creation, established upon the earth in this age as a restoration. There will never be a reformed or reorganized variant of this, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The faith of the people is no whit weakened because of their fewness. This very condition was foretold. Nearly six centuries before the Savior's birth, a Hebrew prophet on the Western Continent predicted the establishment of this Church in the last days, and testified of it, as he had seen in vision, that its members would be found in all parts of the earth, but that their numbers would be relatively small. See Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 14.
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." (Matt. 7:14, also Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 14:14.)
The doors of the Church are open to all, rich and poor, learned and unlearned; and the pleading invitation to enter and become partakers of the blessings that pertain both to mortality and to the eternities beyond is freely extended—to you and yours and to everybody, near and afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.
Footnotes
[1]. See the author's "Story and Philosophy of 'Mormonism'," 136 pp., The Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah.