"Well, sisters," observed Joseph, "you are always on hand. The sisters are always first and foremost in all good works. Mary was first at the resurrection; and the sisters now are the first to work on the inside of the temple." 'Tis but a simple incident, but full of significance. It showed Joseph's instinctive appreciation of woman and her mission. Her place was _inside_ the temple, and he was about to put her there,--a high priestess of Jehovah, to whose name he was building temples. And wonderfully suggestive was his prompting, that woman was the first witness of the resurrection. Once again woman had become an oracle of a new dispensation and a new civilization. She can only properly be this when a temple economy comes round in the unfolding of the ages. She can only be a legitimate oracle _in_ the temple. When she dares to play the oracle, without her divine mission and anointing, she is accounted in society as a witch, a fortune-teller, a medium, who divines for hire and sells the gift of the invisibles for money. But in the temple woman is a sacred and sublime oracle. She is a prophetess and a high priestess. Inside the temple she cannot but be as near the invisibles as man--nearer indeed, from her finer nature, inside the mystic veil, the emblems of which she has worked upon with her own hands. Of old the oracle had a priestly royalty. The story of Alexander the Great and the oracle of Delphi is famous. The conqueror demanded speech from the oracle concerning his destiny. The oracle was a woman; and womanlike she refused to utter the voice of destiny at the imperious bidding of a mortal. But Alexander knew that woman was inspired--that he held in his grip the incarnated spirit of the temple, and he essayed to drag her to the holy ground where speech was given. "He is invincible!" exclaimed the oracle, in wrath. "The oracle speaks!" cried Alexander, in exultation. The prophetess was provoked to an utterance; woman forced to obey the stronger will of man; but it was woman's inspired voice that sent Alexander through the world a conquering destiny. And the prophet of Mormondom knew that woman is, by the gifts of God and nature, an inspired being. If she was this in the temples of Egypt and Greece, more abundantly is she this in the temples of Israel. In them woman is the medium of Jehovah. This is what the divine scheme of the Mormon prophet has made her to this age; and she began her great mission to the world in the temple at Kirtland. But this temple-building of the Mormons has a vaster meaning than the temples of Egypt, the oracles of Greece, or the cathedrals of the Romish Church. It is the vast Hebrew iliad, begun with Abraham and brought down through the ages, in a race still preserved with more than its original quality and fibre; and in a God who is raising up unto Abraham a mystical seed of promise, a latter-day Israel.