That God will help us to reach that point is my prayer, and may the blessings of the Lord attend the family of Sister and Brother Freeze and their children, that not one of them will ever take a course that will bring sorrow to their beloved and sainted mother. That has been one of the stimulants of my life, one of the things that has made me strive to do good. I would not grieve my blessed mother, if I knew it, for anything in the world. There is nothing between me and the heavens that would compensate for doing something that would grieve or hurt my mother. Why? Because she loved me, she would have died for me over and over again, if such were possible, only to have saved me. Why should I grieve, why should I disappoint her? Why should I take a course contrary to her own life and her life's teachings to me, for she taught me honor, and virtue, and truth, and integrity to the kingdom of God, and she taught me not only by precept but by example. I would not grieve her for the world. Boys and girls, do not do anything to grieve your mother. You know she was a Latter-day Saint, you know she was true to her convictions. Be as true as she was, and, as the Lord lives, you will be exalted with your mother, and will have a fulness of joy, which, may God grant, is my prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen.—Young Woman's Journal, Vol. 23, 1911, pp. 128-132.
THE RESURRECTION. Now I am going to take the liberty of reading a little scripture to you, and then, as I go along, express my belief and conviction in relation to what we believe as Latter-day Saints with reference to the resurrection from the dead. I shall not take the pains or time to go into the subject in detail, for there are a great many scriptures that can be brought to bear upon the subject, scattered through the New Testament, in the declaration of the Son of God; but I will content myself by reading the description of his resurrection. We all know that he was lifted upon the cross; that he was pierced in the side, and that his life blood flowed from the body; and that he groaned upon the cross and gave up the spirit; that his body was taken from the cross, embalmed and wrapped in clean linen and laid in a new sepulchre wherein the body of no man had ever been laid. And then, remembering the remark that he was to lay down his body and take it up again, the claim that he made that that temple was to be destroyed but that it would be raised up the third day, that he was going to lay down his life and take it up again, the chief priests went to the chief authorities and demanded that a great stone be placed at the mouth of the sepulchre and that a seal be placed upon it, and that also a guard should be placed there, lest his disciples should come at night and take away the body and impose upon the public the claim that he had risen from the dead. And so a cordon of soldiers were placed to guard the tomb, and a great stone was placed at the mouth of the sepulchre, and a seal was placed upon it according to the history given in the scriptures of it, so that it would be absolutely impossible for the disciples of Christ to perpetrate a deception upon the world by clandestinely stealing and taking away the body of Christ and then proclaiming to the world that his body had been raised from the dead. Sometimes even the enemies of the truth and those who are seeking to destroy it become the unwitting means of verifying truth and of putting it beyond possibility of a doubt; for if they had not taken this precaution themselves, and if their guard had not been placed at the tomb to guard the sepulchre to see that no fraud could be perpetrated, then they could easily have gone out to the world and said, "Why, his disciples came and took the body away; they slipped in and stole it at night." But they closed their own mouths in a vain attempt to destroy the effects of his resurrection from the dead upon the minds of the people and upon the history of the world.
Thomas, one of the Twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came, after his resurrection. "The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." (John 20:25.)
We have a great many Didymuses in our day and generation, but we hope that there are none of them here, but the other class Jesus named.
"And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my bands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." (John 20:26-29)
The disciple who wrote this, the beloved disciple, the personal witness himself, he who ran to the sepulchre and who outran Peter and came to it first, and looked into it, and who afterwards went into it after Peter, he who has written these words, says further: "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." (John 20:30, 31)
Now what I want to call to your minds is, emphatically, the undeniable and unequivocal and direct description of the body, the resurrected body of the Lord Jesus Christ, given in this narrative of his resurrection and appearance to his disciples, which dissipates all imagination or thought that the death of the body and the departure of the spirit from the body is the resurrection of the dead. Does it not? Christ is the Son of God, and his disciples bear faithful record of the truth as they witnessed it—as they declare they did witness it; for they declare that they saw it with their eyes, heard it with their ears, were pricked in their hearts, and they examined the wounds with their own hands, to see and feel that he was indeed the same individual, the same person, the same body that was crucified, bearing the same marks that were inflicted upon the body while it was extended upon the cross—all this must go to show to you that the resurrection of Christ was the resurrection of himself, and not his spirit. Before I proceed further, there is another scripture that I will read to you, from the 24th chapter of Luke:
"And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about three-score furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him." (Luke 24:13-16)
And he journeyed and talked with them on the way, and unfolded the scriptures unto them, but they did not know that it was he. They did not personally know that it was Christ resurrected.
"And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them."