We have read these passages and their associated passages for many years. We have seen what the words say and have said to ourselves, "Yes, it says that, but we must read out of it the taking of the gospel and the blessings of the temple to the Negro people, because they are denied certain things." There are statements in our literature by the early Brethren that we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things, and people write me letters and say,

"You said such and such, and how is it now that we do such and such?" All I can say is that it is time disbelieving people repented and got in line and believed in a living, modern prophet. Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.

We get our truth and light line upon line and precept upon precept (2 Ne. 28:30; Isa. 28:9-10; D&C 98:11-12; 128:21). We have now added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don't matter anymore.{1}

It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June 1978. It is a new day and a new arrangement, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds light out into the world on this subject. As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them. We now do what meridian Israel did when the Lord said the gospel should go to the Gentiles. We forget all the statements that limited the gospel to the house of Israel, and we start going to the Gentiles.

Sometimes we treat scripture and revelation as if they were simplified scientific explanations of things, but I think that is a mistake, and sometimes a serious one. For it assumes that science is the measure of all discourse. Though religious discourse may offer us explanations, its purpose is not explanatory, but soteriological: it is concerned, not with telling us how the world and the things in the world are (at least not in the way that science does), but with telling us about God’s power to save and how we can be saved.

It is true that you can reason about doctrinal matters, but you do not get religion into your life until it becomes a matter of personal experience–until you feel something in your soul, until there has been a change made in your heart, until you become a new creature of the Holy Ghost…