SALT LAKE CITY.
Salt Lake City, Utah, April 6, 1891.
On the last Sunday of last September I was one among the five thousand people who enjoyed the masterly eloquence of Spurgeon at his Tabernacle in London; to-day, Monday, I was in the Mormon Tabernacle, where a conference was being held, and in which were gathered as many people as the great building would hold,—seated and standing, twelve thousand.
Several Mormon elders held forth, but what they said did not particularly interest me. It was, for the most part, a defense of their form of “religion,” and they claimed they had a right, in this free country, to teach and practice their peculiar doctrine.
The acoustic properties of this great edifice are excellent; I tested them in different parts of the house, and heard almost every word that was said by the several speakers. Each spoke but for a short time, ten or fifteen minutes.
The most interesting part of Monday’s “session” to my mind was the musical part, a chorus of two hundred and fifty male and female voices singing to the rich and powerful tones of what is claimed to be the largest organ but one in the world.
A strange feature of the assemblage was the great number of young children and babes in arms; the crowd of baby carriages in the halls and entrances being very noticeable.
The exterior of the Tabernacle, from its oval shape, is often likened to half an egg bisected lengthwise; to me it looks like a tortoise, with its low curved roof and its remarkably short pillars, only a few feet apart.
But it is a mammoth tortoise, 250 × 150 feet, with not a column nor a pillar to obstruct the view—the largest span of unsupported wooden roof in the world.