I will call the attention of the congregation to a portion of a prophecy by Malachi, which will be found in the last chapter of the Old Testament.
"For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
"But unto you that fear my name shall the Son of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth and grow up as calves of the stall.
"And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts."
On arising, and on opening the Bible, I happened to open to the words which I have just read, which were spoken through Malachi, one of the last of the ancient Prophets. They are words very familiar to the Latter-day Saints, for their attention has been often called to them. In reading the prophecies of the holy Prophets, we expect that that portion of them which has not already been fulfilled, will take place in its time and in its season. We do not read the Scriptures as most of the inhabitants of the earth do, thinking that they must be spiritualized. There are scarcely any of the prophecies but what this generation, as well as some of the past generations, interpret as meaning something altogether different from the reading of them. They look upon inspired men as saying one thing and meaning another, and the only way to ascertain what meaning they really wish to convey is to get an uninspired man to give some other meaning entirely different from the literal construction of the words of the inspired writer. There are but few individuals, comparatively speaking, among the nations of Christendom, who differ from the prevalent belief, namely, that the Bible is a book to be understood only by the learning and wisdom of man, that the uninspired preacher, who may be highly educated after the manner of men, is a great deal better qualified to interpret the things of God, than he or they through whom they were spoken. The Latter-day Saints, who may have been similarly trained, were more or less disposed to entertain such views; but when they embraced the everlasting Gospel, and received of the Holy Ghost, even that Spirit by which the Scriptures were written, they were corrected in their judgments, and learned that the word of God would all be fulfilled, which have not already come to pass, and that they are to be understood in the same light, and in the same sense as we would understand the writings of uninspired individuals, when plainly and clearly written upon any special subject. This is something that every ordinarily intelligent man, without any book-learning whatever, is abundantly able to do, especially when simple language, easy of comprehension, is used. For instance, when we get letters and communications from our friends abroad, we never think of putting a different construction upon their sentences, and claim that they did not mean what they had written. When, therefore, the ancient Prophets predicted that "the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven," and that "the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch"—we must believe that the Prophet meant precisely what he said. When we read in the Book of Genesis about the rains which fell from the heavens, causing a flood of waters to deluge the earth, in fulfilment of a certain warning message which had previously been preached to the people then living, by which they were swept away and drowned, we must believe that the inspired writer who penned the words, described the event as it occurred, so far at least as the general facts are concerned, and that the flood spoken of was a literal body of water, and that it did prevail upon all portions of the earth. I do not say that the flood did prevail, at the same moment, upon all the face of the earth; but before the floods abated, every part of the solid portions of the earth that were habitable, were covered by the waters. How this was accomplished is not given by the inspired writer, but is left for us to conjecture. The Lord has a great many ways and means by which he could bring about an event of this nature. For instance, how easy it would be to drown all the inhabitants of the temperate and arctic regions, by just merely stopping the earth from rotating on its axis.