If you cannot provide for your natural lives, how can you expect to have wisdom to obtain eternal lives? God {21} has given you your existence--your body and spirit, and has blest you with ability, and thereby laid the foundation of all knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, and all glory and eternal lives. If you have not attained ability to provide for your natural wants, and for a wife and a few children, what have you to do with heavenly things? 8:68. We cannot even enter the temple when it is built, and perform those ordinances which lead to spiritual blessings, without performing a temporal labor. Temporal ordinances must be performed to secure the spiritual blessings the Great Supreme has in store for his faithful children. Every act is first a temporal act. The Apostle says, faith comes by hearing. What should be heard to produce faith? The preaching of the Word. For that we must have a preacher; and he is not an invisible spirit, but a temporal, ordinary man like ourselves, and subject to the same regulations and rules of life. To preach the Gospel is a temporal labor, and to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is the result of a temporal labor. To be baptized is a temporal labor, both to the person administered to and the administrator. I am a living witness to the truth of this statement, for I have made my feet sore many a time, and tired myself out traveling and preaching, that by hearing the Gospel the people might have faith. The blessings we so earnestly desire will come to us by performing the manual labor required, and thus preparing all things necessary to receive the invisible blessings Jehovah has for his children. 9:240. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. All things are natural, and all are spiritual. Every duty of life, no matter what it is, every requirement necessary to sustain and exalt man, is incorporated in the Kingdom of God and in the ordinances of his house--in the duties God {22} requires of his children. It is all in the Church and Kingdom of our God. "What! our labor?" Yes. I sometimes take the liberty of preaching upon economy to this people. Perhaps some are inclined to think that in so doing I transcend my own duties and obligations. I do not. I instruct the husbandman how to till his farm, because I know and I understand the nature of the elements that produce grain better than he does. I know how he should prepare the elements for the seed to produce the increase which he desires in the things necessary to sustain himself and family. It is my duty to instruct my brethren, if I understand my branch of business better than they do. If I understand how to make myself comfortable--if I understand better than others do the organization of the elements God has given us ability to operate with for our benefit, it is my duty to instruct them. Here are the elements. They are not made in vain, but are made for the benefit, comfort, convenience, and happiness of God's children.