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This devotional address entitled Your Eternal Flight was given on May 17th of

1961 by Hugh B. Brown, then a member of the quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I should like to attempt a type of discourse this morning, which is dangerous.

It's known as the allegorical, or perhaps the prolonged metaphor.

Wise speakers never touch it.

Belonging to a select group who rush in where angels fear to tread I take it on I'd like to select as a sort of a text, some ungrammatical but striking words of a country girl who came to a city high school.

She said, I ain't what I ought to be and I ain't what I'm going to be, but anyhow I ain't what I was.

That thought is more elegantly expressed on a monument over in the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

It's a sculptured falcon, and on the base of the monument we read,

man's flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge.

And another sentence in similar vein,

The soul of man, hungers and thirsts for understanding.

That hunger gnaws at his soul and spirit.

And Emerson added his bit when he said,

Man loves to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.

Now today, the astronauts are the heroes.

We are hearing a lot of them and they're doing a lot for us.

But I should like, if I may, to consider and think of each of you as an astronaut,

one who was launched from another sphere, and is temporarily on this little

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