[Bishop Featherstone] said, "I believe that we have a need beyond the light-wired job, just a little bit of power; I believe it is time, as one great leaders has said, to have the full conduit with all of the powers of the priesthood open to come to those who bear the priesthood."

He then told the priesthood congregation to imagine a great scroll suspended from the ceiling and on it were the names of those who had purchased pornographic literature, viewed x-rated movies, had a masturbation or homosexual problem, were adulterers or engaged in fornication or petting.

"Now, I can tell you this," he said. "I bear my solemn witness that if you do not self-inflict a purging in your lives, the time may well come when there might not he a scroll, but it will be as though there were.

"It may be as though it had been shouted from the tops of houses. People cannot hide sin. You cannot mock God and hold the Lord's holy priesthood and pretend to propose that you are His servant."

He told of a great man who held his dead son in his arms and commanded him, by proper exercising of priesthood authority, to live.

"The dead boy opened his eyes," said Bishop Featherstone. "This great brother could not have possibly done that had he been looking at a pornographic piece of material a few nights before, or if he had been involved in any other transgression of that kind.

"The priesthood has to have a pure conduit to operate."


Vaughn J. Featherstone. Church News, April 12, 1975, p.9