Today the "Mormon" Church is known, by name at least, throughout the civilized world, as well as among most of the semi-cultured peoples in the remoter parts of the earth and on the islands of the sea. The six have increased to over half a million adherents. The growth of the organization is apparent to even the poorly informed. But the Church has not only grown; it has developed. Between growth and development there is an essential difference; and not a few of the grave mistakes of men, even in every-day affairs--in business, in politics, in statesmanship--are traceable to our confusing and confounding the two. Growth alone is the result of accretion, the accumulation of material, the amassing of stuff. Development involves an extension of function, a gradation of efficiency, a passing from immaturity to maturity, from the seed to the fruiting tree. Growth produces big things, and not only things of this sort but men. Between bigness and greatness, however, there is a distinction of kind. Growth is a measure of bulk, of quantity; it is specified as "so many" or "so much"; development is a gradation of quality; its terms are "so good" or "so bad." Our nation boasts a constantly increasing host of big men; the great men of the country may be more easily counted. And as with men so with institutions. Dead things may grow, as witness the tiny salt crystal in its mother-brine--at first a microscopic cube, then a huge hexahedron limited only by the size of the container or other external conditions. Development, however, is the characteristic of life, to which mere growth is essentially secondary and subordinate. The vital character of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been evident from the first. "Mormonism" lives because it is healthy, normal and undeformed. In general, a healthy organism is assured of life, barring destruction from external violence or deprivation of physical necessities; whereas one that is abnormal and sickly is doomed to decline. Opposition to the Church, the pitiless maltreatment to which its people have been subjected, particularly in the earlier decades of its history, comprising mobbings, drivings, spoliation, scourgings, and assassination, have operated to strengthen the Church, body and soul. True, the heat of persecution has scorched and withered a few of the sickly plants, such as had little depth of sincerity; but the general effect has been to promote a fuller growth, and to make richer and more fertile the Garden of the Lord. The Church has never experienced a distinctive period of reduced membership. Always the present has been the time of its highest achievement. In spite of persecution, some of which sprang from misplaced sincerity and zeal while much was born of ignorance and fanaticism, the strength of the institution, measured in terms of loyalty, devotion and unswerving adherence to the principles of the restored Gospel, has steadily increased.