The Heart of the Continent Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX. UTAH'S LIFE PRINCIPLE AND DESTINY. The great ecclesiastical glory of Mot-monism is to be the Temple. This is now in process of erection, but the work is pushed very slowly ?probably with a view to the greater soundness of its foundations, as the other reasons common in such cases, lack of money and of labor, can hardly be operative here,?the Church being enormously wealthy, able to control the time of all its disciples, and blessed with a male membership whose large majority is used to physical labor. The basement of the Temple, as I learned from a Mormon builder, was excavated several years ago, and its foundations partly laid, when Brigham Young discovered in the work something which dissatisfied him, and had it leveled to the ground. The foundations are now well up once more, and the gigantic ashlars are steadily coming in from their quarry in the canons. The stone used is a handsome compact granite, like the Quincy, but even whiter, and in the more ornamental parts of the superstructure will be associated with marble, and that magnificent crystalline limestone, traversed by veins of pure calc-spar, which, in almost every direction around Salt Lake, is found adjoining the metamorphic strata. The City in laid out in the shape of an L, whose upright points north and south. " Temple Block " is situated nearly in the inner angle of this L. On the east Brigham Young's, or " the Prophet's" block, adjoins it, with a street intervening. Ileber Kimball's stands corner to corner with it, just north of Brigham's. That of George Smith (the original prophet's cousin, and keeper of the sacred archives) is on the west of it. Across the street, on the south of it, is the Council House Block. On the southeast is the block occupied by Mr. Wells, one of the chief apostles, a...Read More