in the solemn declaration of the Savior to Nicodemus, which
appears to have been given the widest possible application,--that
except a man be born of water and of the spirit he cannot enter
into the Kingdom of God. (John 3:1-5.)

"Mormonism" proclaims something more than a heaven and a hell, to
one or the other of which all spirits of men shall be assigned,
perhaps on the basis of a very narrow margin of merit or demerit.
As it affirms the existence of an infinite range of graded
intelligences, so it claims the widest and fullest gradation of
conditions of future existence. It holds that the honest,
though, perchance, mistaken soul who lived or tried to live
according to the light he had received, shall be counted among
the honorable of the earth, and shall find opportunity, if not
here then in the hereafter, for compliance with the requirements
essential for salvation. It teaches that repentance with all its
attendant blessings shall be possible beyond the grave; but that
inasmuch as the change we call death does not transform the
character of the soul, repentance there will be difficult for him
who has ruthlessly and willfully rejected the manifold
opportunities afforded him for repentance here. It asserts that
even the heathen devotee who may have bowed down to stocks and
stones, if in so doing he was obeying the highest law of worship
which to his benighted soul had come, shall have part in the
first resurrection, and shall be afforded the opportunity, which
on earth he had not found, of doing that which is required of
God's children for salvation. And for all the dead who have been
without the privileges, perhaps indeed without the knowledge, of
compliance with Christ's law, there shall be given opportunity in
the hereafter.