# PonderIt

## Sunday, December 25, 2005

### Babies

We celebrate two significant births this month. Spencer Kimball quotes a certain F. M. Bareham in General Conference, April 1960 (also included in Faith Precedes the Miracle.)

> A century ago men were following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting with feverish impatience for news of the wars. And all the while in their homes babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles.
> In one year between Trafalgar and Waterloo there stole into the world a host of heroes: Gladstone was born in Liverpool; Tennyson at the Somersby Rectory, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in Massachusetts. Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, and music was enriched by the advent of Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg.
> But nobody thought of babies, everybody was thinking of battles. Yet which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809? We fancy God can manage his world only with great battalions, when all the time he is doing it with beautiful babies.
> When a wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants discovering, God sends a baby into the world to do it."

Kimball went on to say,

> One mother gives us a Shakespeare, another a Michelangelo, and another an Abraham Lincoln, and still another a Joseph Smith!
> When theologians are reeling and stumbling, when lips are pretending and hearts are wandering, and people are "running to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord and cannot find it"—when clouds of error need dissipating and spiritual darkness needs penetrating and heavens need opening, a little infant is born.

Thanks to Janice Kapp Perry in a Cricket and Seagull interview for bringing these quotes to my attention.

#### 1 Comments:

- Thank you for passing them along.

  By Eric Nielson, at 12/27/2005 6:46 AM

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