An Everlasting Dominion

I have begun listening to David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and I was struck by a passage where David described his stepfather Mr. Murdstone shortly after he married David’s mother. The stern man had taken David aside and asked him, “If I have an obstinate horse or dog to deal with, what do you think I do?” When David didn’t have an answer he continued, “I beat him. I make him wince, and smart. I say to myself, ‘I’ll conquer that fellow’; and if it were to cost him all the blood he had, I should do it.” Of course, this was simply a warning about how David was going to be treated by his new stepfather, and David summarized his feelings this way: “I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have been made another creature perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for my childish ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth, instead of in my hypocritical outside, and might have made me respect instead of hate him.” This reminds me of a statement from the Prophet Joseph Smith who said, “Nothing is so much calculated to lead people to forsake sin, as to take them by the hand, and watch over them with tenderness. When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what power it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.” To have real power over someone else is not to control them but to be so good to them that they can’t but help to love you and be devoted to you.

It is easy to be mean and authoritarian and cruel—that is the natural man—but true greatness and power comes from kindness and gentleness and love towards others. In a paradox of sorts, Christ showed most clearly His power for goodness when He refused to use His physical power to save Himself or destroy His enemies. Peter impulsively sought to use his sword as Jesus was being arrested, but the Savior responded, “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:52-53) When He was mocked and struck on the face, He responded calmly, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?” (John 18:23) As He hung there on the cross He was taunted, “He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him” (Matthew 27:42). Indeed, He could have stopped all the pain and persecution and suffering at any moment—calling on those twelve legions of angels—but He showed His divine power of restraint to willingly go through suffering out of love and compassion for all of us. That He did nothing was in fact the greatest thing that He ever did, willingly letting the full weight of the sins of the world come upon Him even until He had given up His mortal life. Nephi summarized it this way: “Wherefore, they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his loving kindness and his long-suffering towards the children of men” (1 Nephi 19:9). His true power was in his loving kindness and long-suffering and goodness which draw us of our own free will eternally to Him, while the adversary seeks continually to “bring you into subjection unto him, that he might encircle you about with his chains, that he might chain you down to everlasting destruction” (Alma 12:6). Unlike David Copperfield’s cruel stepfather, we want to seek to have our “bowels also be full of charity towards all men” like the Savior did, and then shall we truly have “an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto [us] forever and ever” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:45-46).