There are good people throughout the world, men and women who love God, who are earnestly striving, even without the fulness of the gospel, to be true to the standards of decency and integrity they have been taught. Indeed, everyone has access to some measure of light and truth from the Almighty. President Brigham Young declared that there has never been “a man or woman upon the face of the earth, from the days of Adam to this day, who has not been enlightened, instructed, and taught by the revelations of Jesus Christ” (Deseret News Weekly, 8 Feb. 1855, 2). The prophets teach that if people will be true to the light within them—the Light of Christ—they will be led to the higher light of the Holy Ghost found in the covenant gospel, either in this life or in the life to come. “And the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world; and the Spirit enlighteneth every man through the world, that hearkeneth to the voice of the Spirit” (D&C 84:46; see D&C 84:47–48; also Gospel Doctrine, 67–68; Bruce R. McConkie, A New Witness for the Articles of Faith [1985], 260–61).

In fact, is it not possible that one reason so many parallels and resemblances exist between the fulness of the gospel and the various approximations of the truth is that men and women are responding to what might be called “spirit memories” of the past? These would be intimations of things we once knew that now seem just out of conscious awareness. President Joseph F. Smith observed: “All those salient truths which come home so forcibly to the head and heart seem but the awakening of the memories of the spirit. Can we know anything here that we did not know before we came?” (Gospel Doctrine, 13). Is this not why so many who join the Church recognize in the teachings of the missionaries things that they feel they have always known, things, interestingly enough, that are not necessarily to be found in their former religion? We generally refer to those who come into the Church as converts, implying that they turned from another belief to embrace the testimony of the Restoration. While that happens in many instances, those who are baptized will often say, “Everything the missionaries told me I already believed!” That which we call a conversion often seems to be the awakening of a distant memory, an echo from the past. “People ask me why I left my old church,” the convert says. “I tell them it was not a matter of leaving my old church so much as it was a matter of coming home.”