Albert E. Bowen

Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (April 8, 1937 – July 15, 1953)

General Conference Addresses

• April 1952 General Conference
  • Our Religion
    • “Our religion comprehends more than just the ethical code. It contains a body of principles, through the observance of which we are promised the great reward of eternal life and salvation in the kingdom of God.”
    • “Men can be persuaded, their lives reformed through persuasion. No man may be coerced, and no belief was ever established by attempted coercion or force.”
    • “There is only one safety; there is only one cure; and that is to take the pure and unadulterated word of God and set that up as our standard of measurement, and measure every creed and doctrine and dogma by that yardstick.”
• October 1951 General Conference
  • Forgive and Be Forgiven
    • “How do I love myself? Certainly I do not wish myself any ill luck. I do not wish myself any misfortune. I hope my efforts will be prospered. I hope I will be spared misery and distress and sickness and suffering. I hope I will have power to do the things I have it in my heart to do, and to succeed in my undertakings. If I love my neighbor as I love myself, then I must be equally anxious for him, that he shall be prospered, that he shall escape misery and suffering and trial and distress, that his endeavors shall be fruitful of good.”
• April 1951 General Conference
  • Righteousness and Judgment
    • “Intelligence has been interpreted as the ability to comprehend and respond to light and truth. But it is clear from what has been quoted that knowledge and intelligence are congenial companions; and moreover, that to achieve them requires industry, study, diligence, and obedience. Their acquisition is governed by the universal law of reward for effort. They do not come as gratuitous bestowals upon the idler or the indifferent.”
• October 1950 General Conference
  • Why a Church?
    • “Under the impact of agnosticism, atheism, and the extreme humanism which denies God and makes man the source of all meaning, the Christian church as a body has compromised its basic doctrines to make its teachings more harmonious with the current of popular opinion. And where has it got itself? It has lost its saving faith, weakened its influence, and almost forfeited its moral leadership. In consequence, men are floundering about in confusion, not knowing what they ought to do, but well-assured that the fair promises of irreligion and unbelief and human sufficiency have failed them, and they are casting about for anchorage. That is the sorry plight of man in this age.”
• April 1950 General Conference
  • The Basis of Christian Faith
    • “These men believed. Men do not endure that kind of persecution without deep conviction. Here was no lip-service or sham or apologetics or denaturing to suit the doctrines to the tastes or practice of listeners. That is the kind of belief and these were the kind of men who perpetuated the teachings of Jesus in the earth, rescued them from fading into forgetfulness, and carried the Christian faith triumphantly to its establishment as the worship of the majority of the people of the empire which once had proscribed it and decreed the extermination of its adherents.”
• October 1949 General Conference
  • The Struggle of Life
    • “I have no remembrance of sermons in our religious services which did not exhort the congregation to live in closer harmony with gospel teachings. Always the admonition is to do better.”
    • “Perfection has to be achieved; salvation has to be won. They do not come as free bestowals. The process seems to be through winning the struggle for supremacy between human imperfections and the mandates of the God-given perfect law.”
    • “It is by meeting adversities, battling down obstacles, rising triumphant over opposing forces that man builds muscle and moral and intellectual fiber and spiritual stamina.”
• October 1948 General Conference
  • The Importance of Stability
    • “Unless there is an abiding faith in the integrity of Deity, there could be no trust. But there could be neither faith nor trust if he were inconstant, changeable, capricious, or unstable. One must know that he is to be counted on.”
    • “The ultimate law by which man’s conduct is to be judged must be the same law tomorrow as today and so on down through all the tomorrows. Such is our concept of the immutability of the course of God. There is something immensely solid about that concept. It speaks of perpetuity and gives a sense of something enduring to stand on.”
    • “Stability will come when men once more live by the promises they make and in their public morality as in their private conduct, in their religious as in their political life, they develop integrity of purpose and steadfastness to principle and adherence to known laws foundationed in the wisdom of the eternal.”
• April 1948 General Conference
  • Working Out Our Own Salvation
    • “Work is a condition precedent to progress and accomplishment in every realm of life.”
    • “Everything has its price, and, if obtained, the price must be paid. No one ever gets anything for nothing.”
    • “One cannot obtain wisdom, or learning, or beauty of character as a gift or an inheritance.”
    • “Ennobling qualities woven into a life are eternal things. They never cease to be of value or to bring their reward.”
• October 1947 General Conference
  • Faith in Christ
    • “The gospel does not change, though its manner of presentation and technique may. Fundamentally, its basic principles do not alter. If the world had been true, if the Christian nations had remained firm in their faith, we could not have had the two last great wars which broke out right in the heart of Christendom. It comes from a teaching that there is no divinity whom one must revere; that all creeds are alike, as is now taught, and that to be cosmopolitan we have to accept them all and put all of them on the same plane of merit.”
• April 1947 General Conference
  • The Son of God
    • “It cannot be forgotten that the scourging war, which has just devastated the earth, broke out right in the heart of so-called Christendom. Christian nation destroying Christian nation. The degradation left in its wake, the tragic collapse of morals, the earth-searing desolation spread everywhere, and the tottering of the whole social order among peoples who have forgotten God, should teach us lessons in humility and make us know that puny man, of himself, standing in the midst of this universal wreckage, “is no more capable of saving the world than he was of creating it in the first place.””
• October 1946 General Conference
  • Law and Labor
    • “The crying need of this age is for men of stature and character in the seats of power—men who have the intelligence to discern the right and the courage to pursue it without regard to personal consequences to themselves or their ambitions, men who will not succumb to the lure of expediency, but who dare to stand on principle though they stand alone. There are too many favor-currying little men sloshing around in positions requiring big men of unwavering integrity to fill them.”
• April 1946 General Conference
  • The Worth of Great Men
    • “Let’s get over the idea of thinking that everything must be true because it is written in a book. It derives no sanctity from being reduced to print. It has no higher validity than the honesty of thought behind it.”
• October 1945 General Conference
  • The Significance of Belief
    • “There is no promise except to him who believes. Belief here signifies a complete acceptance which in its turn compels conformance to the teaching espoused. The condition is not satisfied by a mere lip service. Professions of belief, no matter how vehemently protested, amount to nothing unless they eventuate in conforming deeds.”
    • “There will be scoffers and deriders. Can we stand derision and still stand unmoved? There will be those in and out of our own membership who will deplore as trivial the differences of belief which set us apart by ourselves, who will recommend that for the sake of easy fraternization we relax in our distinguishing doctrines enough to extinguish apparent differences. It is so much easier and more comfortable to conform to the customs and ideas about us. A little dilution of our beliefs, it will be said, can do no harm.”
• April 1945 General Conference
  • Christian Principles the Only Security
    • “The war is not the cause of the world’s trouble; it is only the outward manifestation of an inner decay. When the war is over, the trouble will not be over, which is the reason for the great concern about the postwar world. The world will still have the spiritual sickness, which is the real cause of the war, to deal with. The moods and notions which have permeated the minds of men cannot be shot with bullets. They will still be rampant when the fighting is over. We may not flatter ourselves that they are confined to the aggressor countries. In one degree or another they have penetrated into all lands. They are doing their work of corroding, corrupting, undermining, destroying.”
    • “You can’t pick up peace and put it on people; it is a state of the spirit. You can’t hand over liberty or freedom as a gift to people who are not spiritually prepared to receive it.”
• October 1944 General Conference
  • The Test of Propriety in Conduct
    • “One thing seems clear: our perplexity grows out of a failure of vision—of penetrating insight. We get ourselves all tangled up in a maze of superficialities and mistake consequences for causes. We tell ourselves over and over again that life in this day has become very complex; that it is not simple and elementary any more as it once was; and that our outlook and approaches to the problems of the day must take on the same complexities as the intricate web of mechanisms we have woven about ourselves.”
    • “There is always a right and a wrong to every question which requires our solution. We might be saved a lot of misery and discontent and disputation in this world if we just stopped to apply the simple test, “what is the right of this thing” before we moved into action concerning it.”
• April 1944 General Conference
  • He Is Risen from the Dead
    • “The great stumbling block to acceptance of the crucifixion and the resurrection, seems to be that they are thought opposed to natural law. But what is natural law? Who established it? It is conceded on almost all sides that there is a supernatural law operative in this universe. Who is to say that in effecting the purposes of God it may not transcend natural law? If you grant God at all, does it seem consistent to suppose that He set laws in motion which froze Him outside of them and rendered Him impotent before the works of His own hands?”
• October 1943 General Conference
  • Education—The Church View
    • “We could not be satisfied, as a people, with our ideals, to remain unacquainted with the learning of the day. We could not be satisfied to be classed among the ignorant, and neither would it conduce to our general temporal welfare if we did that.”
• April 1943 General Conference
  • Peace…The Concern of the Church
    • “There is only one way out of the spiral. The way out is the sound of a voice, not our voice, but a voice coming from something not ourselves, in the existence of which we cannot disbelieve. It is the earthly task of the pastors to hear his voice, to cause us to hear it, and to tell us what it says. If they cannot hear it, or if they fail to tell us, we as laymen, are utterly lost. Without it we are no more capable of saving the world than we were capable of creating it in the first place.”
• October 1942 General Conference
  • Immutables
    • “Now, that admits of no explanation, of no modification. Either those things happened or they did not happen. There is no middle ground; and if they did not happen then we have nothing, because our whole structure is foundationed upon that assumed fact. We accept it as a fact, and we may not temporize with it, try to explain it away, modify it, or liberalize about it. It stands as the basic thing upon which our whole faith is founded. And our whole system of belief exacts of us that we accept those basic truths, without modification or change. As with the moral order of the world so those things may not be changed. They are as binding today as when they were first declared by the voice of God out of the heavens, and they will never change.”
• April 1942 General Conference
  • Whom Say Ye That I Am?
    • “They present America with the issue, clearly drawn, whether religion is a plan and a way of life for mortals emanating from Deity or whether religion shall be taken over by the intellectuals, formulated on their design and made the mere creature and servant of the political state. For the future safety of the world, for the welfare of the souls of men, for the preservation and salvation of our beloved country we can never make that surrender.”
• October 1941 General Conference
  • Compulsion and Freedom
    • “That is all basic in the teachings of Jesus. His ideal of government is self-government. His concern was for purging out of the human heart the ignoble desire supplanting it with worthy purpose.”
    • “We may withstand the invader of our homes, but so long as he has the will to invade we can know no contentment.”
    • “Christ taught a religion, not merely a code of ethics.”
    • “If Christians actually believed they would trust and if they trusted, envy and jealousy and greed and hatred would be subdued.”
• April 1941 General Conference
  • War and Reprisal
    • “Those courses of behavior which harmonize with and conform to absolute spiritual values must be eternally right just as their opposites must be eternally wrong. Between the two there is undying conflict. They cannot accommodate themselves one to the other.”
    • “Wherever the majority opinion may for the moment lie, or however the conflict may swirl and lash about it the eternal right must still stand unshaken and unmoved as the fixed base to which men may with assurance and safety anchor their lives. That which is right does not become wrong merely because it may be deserted by the majority, neither does that which is wrong today become right tomorrow by the chance circumstance that it has won the approval or been adopted by overwhelmingly predominant numbers.”
    • “”Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Its exercise cannot safely be left to mortals. In nothing is the futility of war more surely revealed than in the inevitable consequence of reprisals. The victor despoils the vanquished. The latter with an undimmed memory waits the day of retribution and when the time of reckoning comes takes back what was before lost with something more besides, thus sowing the seed of a future war. Seemingly the memory of nations is long; they never forget and war never ends war.”
• October 1940 General Conference
  • Liberty
    • “Liberty is a thing of the spirit. A man must nourish it and cherish it in his heart as he does love for his wife and children.”
    • “We sometimes are bewildered at the sudden collapse of a man’s character which theretofore had been rated high. It will generally be found that the degenerating process had been working in him a long time before the crash came.”
• April 1940 General Conference
  • The Abundant Life
    • “Salvation meant to Him something far different than the mere physical comfort or even preservation of the mortal body, or the gratification of the physical senses, or the invention of new excitements to relieve us of our artificially created boredoms.”
    • “Between the material and the spiritual, properly coordinated, there is no sharp line of separation, but the material must always be servant of the spiritual, its proper sovereign.”
    • “Mortality is not the ultimate destiny of man. The things essential to mortal life are in life and of life, but they are not life itself; they are mere incidentals.”
    • “The commandments emanated from Jesus himself. Before it could be expected that men would accept them, they must accept Him.”
• October 1939 General Conference
  • Freedom from Hate
    • “But faced with the barbarous atrocities of our own fellow men we stand shaken and dismayed. Their capability for devising and remorselessly executing exquisite torment and suffering have gone far to destroy faith in the goodness of the world and the capacity of man to emerge out of barbarism or rise to the ideal plane which has been the dream of the philosopher, the vision of the poet and the promise of the prophets.”
    • “The Master taught love, but today men preach hate—hate of governments—outside their own, and sometimes even of them— hate of races, hate of peoples, hate of classes, hate of neighbor, hate of competitors, hate of rivals, hate of the good fortune of others, hate of everyone of opposing views. The fruits of that hate are strife and destruction and individual unhappiness.”
    • “Compulsion teaches nothing to the spirit. It destroys the soul. It produces no enduring benefits.”
• April 1939 General Conference
  • Christ’s Teachings a Stabilizing Force
    • “It becomes apparent that it is not easy to deny God and at the same time to cling to Jesus for any purpose, for it is the majesty of divine authority with which he invested them that imparts to his moral teachings their singular power.”
• October 1938 General Conference
  • Honesty
    • “If men did not covet they would not steal. If there were no violation of the tenth commandment, there would be no violation of the eighth commandment.”
    • “Honesty lies at the very root of any stable society. If all were thieves, no society could exist.”
    • “Honesty condemns falsity in all its forms. It does not permit the bearing of false witness. It banishes from out its pale the demagogic art of vilifying and misrepresenting one person or class for the purpose of arraying another person or class against the first. It does not sow dissension. Trust, confidence, assurance and peace are the offspring of honesty.”
• April 1938 General Conference
  • Freedom
    • “Any system of government which depends for its continuance upon the compelled obedience of any considerable part of its citizens is foredoomed to ultimate failure, because it is violative of the principle of freedom which is a God-given quality coextensive with life, and, like life, one of man’s inalienable rights.”
    • “Freedom signifies more than a release from outward restraint. It is an essence, a quality of the spirit whose rarest blossoms, in an atmosphere of oppression, wither and die.”
    • “Freedom is not bestowed; it is achieved. It is not a gift, but a conquest. It does not abide; it must be preserved.”
• October 1937 General Conference
  • Our Heritage
    • “Our fathers themselves had left behind them houses and lands when they came here. None of these could they bring. But what mattered that? They did bring with them the faith and the spirit and the power and the will and the purpose to subdue other lands, and to build new houses, to raise up other communities and to devise other means of supplying physical needs. These qualities of heart and soul could not be taken from them; they were beyond the grasp of the despoiler. They were the veritable treasures of heaven which thieves could not break through nor steal, and which, if incorporated into life, could never be corrupted by moth nor rust.”
    • “On this foundation principle they built. By adherence to it they triumphed. They recognized that no enduring society was ever founded on the basis of physical comfort, but that, paradoxical as it may seem, the supposedly nebulous, intangible spiritual things constitute the only solid foundation on which to build. They had the depth of conviction which gave them the courage to choose the spiritual and to make it the chief stone of the corner upon which to rear their commonwealth.”
    • “Mastery of natural forces can be achieved only by understanding and observing the laws by which they are governed. It is fair to conclude that spiritual and mental growth can be attained only by obedience to the laws on which they are predicated.”
    • “Only the individual himself can develop his bodily or mental or spiritual powers. No one else may do either for him.”
    • “Spirituality may not be defined. It may only be illustrated. It is a quality that exhibits itself in the poise and serenity of those who possess it. It reveals itself in those moments of high exaltation when a man’s soul soars high above material things and wings its way into the realm of the infinite. It is that in man which gives him kingship over himself and makes him aware of his kinship with God.”
• April 1937 General Conference
  • A New Calling
    • “The only thing in the world that counts is people. When the creation of the world was finished, as the last and crowning act God made man to dwell in it, and he gave to him for his use everything that was created, and told him that he might exercise dominion over the earth. In all of his ministry Jesus was concerned only with people; nothing else mattered.”
    • “Whatever our position may be, in whatever sphere we labor, we are all dedicated to the business of ministering to the welfare of people, trying to make mankind rise to the stature of his destiny. That is the province of the teacher, and every man in this Church is a teacher.”
    • “We need the power to lead men up to high eminences from which they may see the world, their own positions in it, and the destinies that await them if they order their lives aright. If anything is needed more than anything else now it is a voice issuing as from the top of a high mountain, lifting men’s visions to the high level whence it comes, and revealing to them what there is in the world and what they may do in the exercise of their prerogatives and rights in accomplishing the world’s work. And if we be what we have pretended so long we are, then we have that kind of voice. It behooves us only to learn to hear and understand it, and govern our walk and conduct by its teachings.”

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