Does it never give thee pause, that men used to have a soul — not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech: but as a truth that they knew, and acted upon! Verily it was another world then … but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls ... we shall have to go in search of them again, or worse in all ways shall befall us.The author of TGL&PPPS then suggests a profound follow-up:
Did any of you ever think that along about the time the notion of a SOUL gave out, Freud popped up with the EGO to take its place? ... It is my belief that men must spout this twaddle about egos, because they fear they have no soul.Nearly all of the traits society has neglected in its swaggle through modernity - including virtue, sobriety, civility, and love - find the beginning of loss in a refusal to believe in or tend to the soul. Society, as Elder D. Todd Cristofferson said last Sunday, has exchanged the once inviolate internal controls that, based largely on religious thought and civil upbringing, used to ensure proper behaviour for a mess of external ones. Instead of an inner moral compass - that derives automatically from recognizing the reality of the soul - society now relies on ever-changing, pliable "regulations" to keep us in check.*
But no matter how many rules are written, unless humanity again learns to recognize the soul (not as hearsay or naive mythology, but as eternal truth) and act accordingly, we will never be able to prevent the nearly inevitable slog away from decency and toward degenerative degradation.
* Interesting Side Note: E. Christofferson seems to suggest that the effectiveness of a free market model depends not on an unbreakable tome of rules and regulations (as many in Washington seem to believe), but instead on a system of internal ethical and moral controls that must be imbued into the very nature of the people who work within the market.
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