GIFTS: Maeterlink's fairy play: a profound gospel insight

In The Bluebird, Maeterlink pictures unborn children summoned to earth life. As one group approaches the earth, the voices of the children earthward tending are heard in the distance to cry, "The earth! The earth! I can see it! How beautiful it is!"

Then, following these cries of ecstasy, there issued from out of the depth of the abyss a sweet song of gentleness and expectancy in reference to which the author says, "It is the song of the mothers coming out to meet them."

Maeterlink's fairy play is not all fantasy or imagination. Neither is Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality", wherein he said:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, Who is our home.

It is given as a fact in revelation that Abraham was chosen before he was born. Songs of expectant parents come from all parts of the earth, and each little spirit is attracted to the peculiar situation for which that spirit has prepared itself.

If none of these spirits was permitted to enter mortality until they were all good and pure and great and could become leaders, then the diversity of conditions among the children of men as we see them today would indicate discrimination and injustice.

If, in their eagerness to take bodies, they were willing to come to any circumstance for which they were peculiarly worthy, or to which they were particularly attracted, then they were given the full reward of merit and were satisfied, yes, and even blessed.

---from a letter written by President David O. McKay and quoted
by Elder Harold B. Lee on 27 April 1969 in a talk given at Brigham
Young University.

"But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things."