Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the MormonsRobinson, Phil
General
Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons
Robinson, Phil
Latter Day Saint churches; Utah -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
I ought to say that this Temple at Logan is the only one I have
entered, and it is only because it is not completed. This year the
building will be finished--so it is hoped--and the ceremony of
dedication will then attract an enormous crowd of Mormons. It is
something over 90 feet in height (not including the towers, which
are still wanting) and measures 160 feet by 70. On the ground floor,
judging from what I know of the secret ritual of the Church, are
the reception-rooms of the candidates for the "endowments," various
official rooms, and the font for baptism. The great laver, 10 feet
in diameter, will rest on the backs of twelve oxen cast in iron
(and modelled from a Devon ox bred by Brigham Young) and will be
descended to by flights of steps, the oxen themselves standing in
water half-knee-deep. On the next floor are the apartments in which
the allegorical panorama of the "Creation" and the "Fall of Man" will
be represented. Here, too, will be the "Veil," the final degree in
what might be called, in Masonic phrase, "craft" or "blue" Masonry,
and, except for higher honorary grades, the ultimate objective point
of Mormon initiation. Above these rooms is a vast hall, occupying the
whole floor, in which general assemblies of the initiated brethren and
"chapters" will be held. The whole forms a very imposing pile of great
solidity and some grandeur, built of a gloomy, slate-coloured stone (to
be eventually coloured a lighter tint), and standing on a magnificent
site, being raised above the town upon an upper "bench" of the slope,
and showing out superbly against the monstrous mountain about a mile
behind it. The mountain, of course, dwarfs the Temple by its proximity,
but the position of the building was undoubtedly "an architectural
inspiration," and gives the great pile all the dominant eminence which
Mormons claim for their Church.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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