God's Truth, Continually Unfolding

In the teachings of the Savior and his followers, uttered on various occasions, we have many important truths, not fully understood at the time when uttered, and perhaps not fully understood now, but which will be comprehended when lighted up by Providence, and when seen in the renewed and adequate preparation of the human mind. One of the great announcements to which we refer, is the truth of universal brotherhood, involving the cessation of war, and the restoration of universal peace.  This is a truth which may be said to be written in  letters of light on the pages of the Gospel; but the human mind, being thrown out of its true position by sin, has not been able to receive it until very lately.  A century or more since, the doctrines of universal peace were proposed and illustrated in Europe, by Castel de St. Pierre, a learned French ecclesiastic; but were received with incredulity, and very much as if he were preaching a dream. They have been propounded again within a few years, and after the experience of an additional century of fighting and destruction. They now everywhere meet with a respectful hearing. It is the same in other instances. There are other practical truths, — truths originating in the divine mind, and flowing from God to man through the mind of Christ, which have received a new development, and which the providence of God is holding up for a new and general reception in the present age; — the religion of Christ in its simplicity, the reign of the Holy Ghost, the relation of temperance to happiness, the universality of civil freedom, the rights of moral and religious belief, universal education, and in every heart a living and triumphant holiness, modeled on that of the Savior.

God is moving on the troubled waters. It was thus in the beginning. There was a time when the beauty of nature was an idea, undeveloped and unrealized. Light existed in God, " but darkness was on the face of the deep." No sun was then, no star, no swelling and teeming earth. "The earth was without form and void;" but when the time came for the realization of the truth and beauty of the divine idea in material forms: then "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The confusion of chaos stood rebuked; the light shone; the waters subsided to their place; the blooming earth appeared.

At this moment, at this eventful hour in the history of  eternal wisdom, the Spirit of the same creating God is secretly, but powerfully, moving on the troubled and chaotic ocean of humanity. The chaos, which is presented before us on every side, is wider, and deeper, and darker, than  that  of primitive nature, because it is the terrible chaos of moral rebellion. But here, too, the Spirit of God will be conqueror. He, who separated the contending elements of nature, and recombined them into forms of wisdom and loveliness, will not be baffled in his great  attempt to erect and consolidate "the  kingdom of God," out of the confusions of a fallen nature.

— A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 3, Chapter 4.