My brothers and sisters, I appreciate very much this great privilege of having some part with you and with the activity of this wonderful University. Not only do I always get a thrill when I come on this campus, but I get a thrill when I even think about the great numbers of you who have this wonderful privilege of coming here and spending part of your lives in studying, thinking, and enjoying the association of each other and the leadership of the wise teachers that you have here. This is a place where you can come to pray and live and enjoy the wonders that have been provided for you in this most important dispensation.

I would just like to say to you that you live in the greatest age that has ever been known in the world. Your forefather's lived on a flat, stationary earth and plowed their ground with a wooden stick, whereas you live on an earth of power steering and jet propulsion where all kinds of knowledge explosions are constantly taking place. We need to develop a character and a personality to match the times.

You live in the greatest nation that has ever been known since creation. How grateful we ought to be that we did not have in our Founding Fathers the kind of leadership that used Stalin blood purges, Hitler gas ovens, and Castro indignities as the instruments of government! Just think what a different kind of people we might be and what a different nation this would be if we had had the leadership of men other than those that God raised up to write our Constitution and to establish this nation upon Christian principles.

You live in a time when the knowledge of medicine gives us strong bodies and clear minds. If you had lived in Jerusalem nineteen hundred years ago, your life expectancy at birth would have been nineteen years. This means that of the people who lived and died in that period some lived to be ninety, I suppose, and a great many died at birth; but the average span of life then was nineteen years. If you had been born in George Washington's day in America you would have had an expectation of life of thirty-five years. When I was born it was forty-eight years, but the baby that was born in the Provo hospital today has a life expectation of seventy-five years. That is a very long period of time, and I know because that is just the period that I have been here. (Somebody once asked a man, "Have you lived here all your life?" And he said, "Not yet.") But I am very grateful for those twenty-seven years of life that have already been given to me above the promise that life made to me when I was born. How grateful we ought to be that God and our civilization are adding to our life expectation to give us more time to make more out of this all-important period of our second estate!

If any of you plan to remember anything that I am going to say to you tonight, I would just like to have you write in your notebook that--and I am sure of this--the one business of life is to succeed. I am absolutely certain in my own mind that God did not go to all the trouble of creating this beautiful earth, with all of its utilities and beauties and opportunities, without something very important in mind for those he expected to live here upon it. And I am even more sure that he did not create us in his own image and endow us with these potentially magnificent brains, miraculous personalities, and fantastic physical bodies and then expect us to waste our lives in failure.

Yet I am also sure of this: that the greatest waste there is in the world is not the devastation that goes with war, nor the cost of crime. It is not the erosion of our soils, nor the depletion of our raw materials, nor the loss of our gold supply. The greatest waste there is in the world is that human beings--you and I--live so far below the level of our possibility. Compared with what we might be, we are just partly alive. That is, we sometimes become guilty of the great sins of fractional devotion and marginal morals, and we turn our lives into a minimum performance. What good does it do to live in this great nation and possess this magnificent earth on which we live if we do not live our lives at the top of our condition? What good does it do for us to come here and accomplish things that might just as well have been done at other, less abundantly blessed times?

We have these longer lives, and medicine gives us the clearer minds and stronger bodies. The gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored in a fullness never before known in the world. The pathway to eternal life is now brilliantly lighted and perfectly marked so that no one need get off that straight and narrow way except by his own choice. But none of this helps us very much unless we make something out of it above what was made out of it in other times. We live in a very important period; and you have the extra favorable opportunity of coming to this great University where you may have those possessing the greatest intelligence as your teachers and where you may have the most profitable information that has ever been developed in all of the world for your benefit.

One of the problems that I would like to talk over with you tonight is that great power of evil in our lives that we sometimes call inertia. There is a tendency in nature for things to remain inert; for example, the stone rests on the mountainside for a thousand years, having no power within itself to move. But this is a power that influences nature. A bullet fired from the most powerful rifle, as soon as it uses up its momentum derived from its source of power, soon stops and comes to a complete rest. An automobile being driven comes to a complete rest. An automobile being driven down the highway, unless constantly receiving new fuel from the gas tank, will run out of power, wear out its momentum, and stop.

Human beings also tend to be like that; we have a natural instinct within us to be inert, to be inactive. We have a powerful appetite to come to rest. Like the stone on the mountainside, we have a tendency to remain where we are rather than doing the things that we ought to do or being as active as we ought to be. Given a push over the cliff, the stone on the mountainside will roll down the hill, but as soon as it wears out its momentum it will come to a stop. Somebody wrote a poem about this as it applies in human life. I do not know who the author was, but this is what he says: