Themes to this day not understood by the Gentiles! Incomprehensible to the divines of Christendom!
The everlasting perpetuation of a chosen race—a diviner monument in its dispersion and preservation than in its national antiquity. Its restoration to more than its ancient empire, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, with Jehovah exalted in his chosen people as the Lord God Omnipotent, is the vast subject of the prophetic Hebrews.
It was such a theme that inspired the genius of grand Isaiah, swelling into the exultation of millennial jubilee for Israel, in his great declamatory of "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God!"
Gentile Christendom has never been en rapport with the Abrahamic subject. It has not incarnated its genius. It is destitute of the very sense to appreciate the theme of Jerusalem rebuilt.
Israelitish Mormondom does understand that subject. It has fully incarnated its genius. It has, not only the prophetic sense to appreciate the theme of Old Jerusalem rebuilt, but also the rising of the New Jerusalem of the last days, whose interpreted symbol shall be, "The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!"
The divines of a Romish Christianity—Romish, notwithstanding its sectarian protestantism—have worn threadbare the New Testament; but the epic soul of the old Hebrew Bible has never possessed Gentile Christendom. To it, the prophesies and sublimities of Isaiah, and the everlasting vastness of the Abrahamic covenant and promise, are all, at best, but as glorious echoes from the vaults of dead and long buried ages.
Who has blown the trump of this Hebraic resurrection? One only—the prophet of Mormondom!
The Mormons are, as it were, clothing that soul with flesh—giving the themes of that everlasting epic forms and types. Their Israelitish action has made the very age palpitate. They render the "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God!" as literally as did they the command of their prophet to preach the gospel to the British Isles, and gather the saints from that land.
The thread of history leads us directly to a significant episode in the life of Eliza R. Snow, a prophetess and high priestess of Hebraic Mormondom, in which the "Comfort ye my people" became embodied in an actual mission to Jerusalem.
Very familiar to the Mormons is the fact that, at the period when Joseph sent the Twelve to foreign lands, two of their number, Orson Hyde and John E. Page, were appointed on mission to Jerusalem. The Apostle Page failed to fulfill his call, and ultimately apostatized; but Orson Hyde honored the voice that oracled the restoration of Israel, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. He did not preach to Judah in the ordinary way, but on the Mount of Olives he reconsecrated the land, and uttered to the listening heavens a command for the Jews to gather and rebuild the waste places. It was as the refrain of the invisible fathers, concerning Israel's redemption, rising from the hearts of their Mormon children. And that mission of Orson Hyde was but a prophesy, to the sons of Judah, of coming events. Other missions were ordained, as it were, to psychologize the age into listening to the voice of Judah's comforter.