LeGrand Richards
"I have just had the privilege, with my wife, by appointment of President McKay, of touring five of the missions of Europe -- the Danish, the Swedish, the Norwegian, the Finnish, and the Netherlands Missions -- and Sister Richards and I appreciate that opportunity very, very much. I love missionary work….
"When you stop to think in those lands, according to reports, there are only about five percent (I think it was three, but to be safe I will say five percent) of the people of those lands who attend church at all of any kind, and then you know how little there can be in their lives really to live for. Sometimes I thought as we went through those missions that about all they live for was their vacation, because they are great people to have a vacation every summer. I will not take time to go into detail about that. But they did not seem to be looking to eternal life or eternal exaltation or eternal companionship with those whom they love. They did not know anything about things like that. The newspapers even write articles discussing the fact that there is no God.
“I was told that many of the ministers will openly admit to their members that they do not know whether there is a God or not. So, you see, they need the missionaries. They need this wonderful message that we have.” (Conference Report, Oct. 1, 1959, p. 33-4)
Elder A. Theodore Tuttle
"Several years ago in a seminary recognized as perhaps the greatest in this country, a doctor of divinity, who had a string of honorary doctoral degrees and who is on the board of directors of one of the largest Protestant churches in America, in lecturing to a large group of students, most of whom already had bachelor of divinity degrees, said, sympathetically:
’I know that it is difficult for you men to teach creeds which you, yourselves, do not believe, but you have the social obligation to do it.’
“Another man in the same institution, having about the same academic credentials, declared: ’Who knows but what in the year 2004 or some other year, there will live a man who will live more perfectly than did Jesus. Then we will worship him as the Son of God, rather than Jesus. The reason we worship Jesus as the Son of God is because he lived the most perfect life of any man of whom we have knowledge.’” (Conference Report, Oct. 1960, p. 54 as taken from Latter-day Commentary on the Book of Mormon compiled by K. Douglas Bassett, p. 161)
Harold B. Lee
“I recently heard a missionary for the Church tell of an incident which occurred in an atheist-dominated country. A young student with a fervent belief in God and in the mission of the Savior of the world was ridiculed and abused by her teacher who scorned the idea of a God. As a punishment, the teacher required that she write twenty times, ’There is no God.’ The young student refused. In a rage the teacher demanded that she write her denial of God, fifty times and added, as a veiled threat, ‘If you don’t, something terrible will happen.’ That night mother and daughter fasted and prayed far into the night to that God whom they could not and dared not deny. When school time came the next morning, mother and daughter went to see the teacher. The school convened and the teacher had not arrived. As they waited, the principal of the school came to inform them that the teacher had died suddenly in the night of a heart attack. Something terrible had happened but not to this young girl who came without fear ’in the name of the Lord.’” (Conference Report, Apr. 1955, p. 19)