The Women of Mormondom

by Edward W. Tullidge

But woman must not be lost to view in our admiration of the prophet's conceptions.

How stands woman in the grand temple economy, as she loomed up in her mission, from the house of the Lord in Kirtland?

The apostles and elders laid the foundations, raised the arches, and put on the cap stone; but it was woman that did the "inner work of the temple."

George A. Smith hauled the first load of rock; Heber C. Kimball worked as an operative mason, and Brigham Young as a painter and glazier in the house; but the sisters wrought on the "veils of the temple."

Sister Polly Angel, wife of Truman O. Angel, the church architect, relates that she and a band of sisters were working on the "veils," one day, when the prophet and Sidney Rigdon came in.

"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.