Keep the Chain Unbroken | Gordon B. Hinckley | 1999

Life is a great chain of generations that we in the Church believe must be linked together. Never permit yourself to become a weak link in the chain.

This speech was given on November 30, 1999.

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"My dear young friends, it is a great honor to be with you this morning. How very much I love you. How I honor you and respect you. You do great credit to this church. You are not everything you ought to be, but by and large you are very good, and you can become what you ought to be. You are very fortunate to be here. What a blessing to mingle with thousands of your own kind, to establish friendships that will endure, to be engaged in a great and challenging pursuit of knowledge.

This is a marvelous time in the history of the world. How exciting it is to be on the stage of life when one millennium rolls into another. That happens only every thousand years. It has happened only twice since the birth of the Son of God. We speak of this sick old world that has seen so much of tragedy—almost all of it caused by man’s inhumanity to man. It is the result of greed and ambition, of selfishness and brutality.

In the first millennium the world lapsed into an age of darkness. It was a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people” (Isaiah 60:2).

Men did not live long at that time. There was so much of disease, of pestilence, that raged over many parts of the earth. The great plague took the lives of one-third of the people of Europe. With all of the disease, with wars and conflict, with accidents and hunger and cold so widely prevalent, I sometimes wonder how enough people survived to provide you and me with ancestors. Then the Renaissance began to dawn. It flowered, and I believe it is still flowering with magnificence.

As we close this great and remarkable century, I stand in awe of the blessings we have. I have now lived through 90 years of this century. When I think of the wonders that have come to pass in my lifetime—more than during all the rest of human history together—I stand in reverence and gratitude. I think of the automobile and the airplane, of computers, fax machines, e-mail, and the Internet. It is all so miraculous and wonderful. I think of the giant steps made in medicine and sanitation. I think that all of the great medicines we use, with the possible exception of aspirin, have come forth in this century, including the antibiotics that have healed and made well generations of beneficiaries. When I was born, the life expectancy of a man in the United States was 50 years. Today it is more than 75. To think that 25 years have been added to the life of an average man in North America and western Europe is miraculous.

I am led to exclaim with the words to the hymn:

We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling;
To be living is sublime.
[Arthur Cleveland Coxe, “We Are Living, We Are Dwelling” (1840), in The Hymnbook (Richmond: Presbyterian Church in the United States, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and Reformed Church in America, 1955), no. 356]

And with all of this there has been the restoration of the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. You and I are a part of the miracle and wonder of this great cause and kingdom that is sweeping over the earth blessing the lives of people wherever it reaches. How profoundly thankful I feel.

No generation that ever walked the earth is as fortunate as are you. I believe that it was of this day that the prophet Joel spoke when he said: “And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28).

We are the beneficiaries of the visions and the dreams, the labors and the sacrifices of all who have gone before us.

They are gone, and we are here.

Recently, at the dedication of the Columbus Temple in Ohio, I had an interesting experience. My wife and daughter were with me. A granddaughter and her husband and children drove up from St. Louis.

As I sat in the celestial room, I thought of my great-grandfather, the first in my family to join the Church. I had recently visited his place of burial in Canada just to the north of the New York boundary line. He accepted the gospel when the first missionaries came there from Kirtland. His children were too young for baptism. He died at the young age of 38...."

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