Joseph was gifted with wonderful memories of the "eternities past." He had not forgotten woman. He knew Eve, and he remembered Zion. He restored woman to her place among the Gods, where her primeval Genesis is written.
Woman was among the morning stars, when they sang together for joy, at the laying of the foundations of the earth.
When the sons of God thrice gave their Masonic shouts of hosanna, the daughters of God lifted up their voices with their brothers; and the hallelujahs to the Lord God Omnipotent, were rendered sweeter and diviner by woman leading the theme.
In the temples, both of the heavens and the earth, woman is found. She is there in her character of Eve, and in her character of Zion. The one is the type of earth, the other the type of heaven; the one the mystical name of the mortal, the other of the celestial, woman.
The Mormon prophet rectified the divine drama. Man is nowhere where woman is not. Mormonism has restored woman to her pinnacle.
Presently woman herself shall sing of her divine origin. A high priestess of the faith shall interpret the themes of herself and of her Father-and-Mother God!
At the very moment when the learned divines of Christendom were glorying that this little earth was the "be-all and the end-all" of creation, the prophet of Mormondom was teaching the sisters in the temple at Kirtland that there has been an eternal chain of creations coming down from the generations of the Gods—worlds and systems and universes. At the time these lights of the Gentiles were pointing to the star-fretted vault of immensity as so many illuminations—lamps hung out by the Creator, six thousand years ago, to light this little earth through her probation—the prophet of Israel was teaching his people that the starry hosts were worlds and suns and universes, some of which had being millions of ages before this earth had physical form.
Moreover, so vast is the divine scheme, and stupendous the works of creations, that the prophet introduced the expressive word eternities. The eternities are the times of creations.
This earth is but an atom in the immensities of creations. Innumerable worlds have been peopled with "living souls" of the order of mankind; innumerable worlds have passed through their probations; innumerable worlds have been redeemed, resurrected, and celestialized.
Hell-loving apostles of the sects were sending ninety-nine hundredths of this poor, young, forlorn earth to the bottomless pit. The Mormon prophet was finding out grand old universes, in exaltation with scarcely the necessity of losing a soul.