Every believer in individual existence beyond the grave—and everybody believes in or fears the certainty of such a state—hopes and yearns for the blessed condition we call salvation. On the authority of Scripture the Church proclaims that "through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel"; and conversely, that without compliance with the laws and ordinances prescribed by Jesus Christ no man can have place in the Kingdom of God.
Who can doubt this basal and portentous truth in the light of the Savior's definite and unqualified affirmation to the learned Jew, Nicodemus, respecting baptism by water and of the Spirit (see John 3:5), which requirements are among the fundamental laws and ordinances of the Gospel?
In His comprehensive declaration our Lord made no discrimination of classes, drew no distinction between the living and the dead. But what of the unnumbered hosts who have lived and died without a knowledge of the indispensability of baptism, or, though they knew yet never had opportunity to be baptized by one holding the authority of the Holy Priesthood to so administer? Are they irrecoverably lost? A frightful thought!
When Death is reaping so rank a harvest through war, pestilence, and famine, can we bear to believe it?
What of those beloved fathers, husbands, brothers, sons—yours or some others'—who have fallen on the blooddrenched fields beyond the seas—are they, because unbaptized, to be forever shut out from the Kingdom of God, even though they have died martyrs to the cause of the Divine purpose in the vindication of the liberties of mankind?
Verily, No! The living may be baptized for the dead, as they were in earlier dispensations. Ponder the profound significance of Paul's climacteric question relating to the actuality of the resurrection: "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?" (1 Cor. 15:29.)
Those still in the flesh may officiate vicariously for their departed progenitors; but for this service the genealogy of the dead is indispensable. Furthermore, vicarious ordinances are administered only in sacred Temples, reared, dedicated, and maintained for this ministry; for so the Lord has directed.
Hence the Latter-day Saints are diligently seeking out the records of their dead and are ministering for them in holy Temples. This we hold to be the bounden duty of the living in behalf of the departed, the discharge of which is as truly essential to our exaltation as to theirs.
"For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers 'that they without us cannot be made perfect'; neither can we without our dead be made perfect." (D&C 128:15; see also Hebrews 11:40.)