All America, the New Jerusalem of the last days! All America for the God of Israel! What a conception! Yet these daughters of Zion perfectly understood it nearly fifty years ago.
Joseph was indeed a sublime and daring oracle. Such a conception grasped even before he laid the foundation stone of a Zion—that all America is to be the New Jerusalem of the world and of the future—was worthy to make him the prophet of America.
Zion was not a county in Missouri, a city in Ohio or Illinois; nor is she now a mere embryo State in the Rocky Mountains.
Kirtland was but a "stake of Zion" where the first temple rose. Jackson county is the enchanted spot where the "centre stake" of Zion is to be planted, and the grand temple reared, by-and-by. Nauvoo with its temple was another stake. Utah also is but a stake. Here we have already the temple of St. George, and in Salt Lake City a temple is being built which will be a Masonic unique to this continent.
Perchance it will stand in the coming time scarcely less a monument to the name of its builder—Brigham Young—than the temple of Old Jerusalem has been to the name of Solomon.
But all America is the world's New Jerusalem!
With this cardinal conception crowding the soul of the Mormon prophet, inspired by the very archangels of Israel, what a vast Abrahamic drama opened to the view of the saints in Kirtland when the first temple lifted its sacred tower to the skies!
The archangels of Israel had come down to fulfill on earth the grand Abrahamic programme. The two worlds—the visible and the invisible—were quickly engaging in the divine action, to consummate, in this "dispensation of the fullness of times," the promises made unto the fathers.
And all America for the God of Israel.
There is method in Mormonism—method infinite. Mormonism is Masonic. The God of Israel is a covenant maker; the crown of the covenant is the temple.