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Show Page 103 Heber Kimball, assigned to travel the East and "cast up a highway" for the Saints - to smooth a path for Mormon converts both physically and 5 financially. Funds were needed for the temple and the Nauvoo House, a hotel under construction near the river. The two missionaries preached through Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, in a region well-known to Orson. Here they met four others of the Twelve, among them the maverick apostle John E. Page, who was thunderously denouncing sectarian principles in the meeting halls of the city. The first week of August the six traveled to Philadelphia where they visited Independence Hall, sat in the chair occupied by John Hancock, and admired a painting of great symbolic significance to them: 6 Benjamin West's "Paul and Barnabas." Orson preached up and down the Schuylkill River before heading to New York, where he gave a powerful sermon on the world-wide import of the Book of Mormon message, laying great emphasis on its value as a history as well as a rule of faith. Thence to Providence and Boston , where he preached on the subject of the temple: "When the temple is reared, God will manifest Himself in a peculiar manner. If we are obedient, He has told us He will make manifest to us things we are ignorant of. He has said He will reveal things which pertain to this dispensation that have been hidden and kept secret from the foundation of the world. No former age or generation of the world have had the same things revealed: all other dispensations will be swallowed up in this." 7 In other words, the temple would serve as a culmination of sacred history as well as a ritual center. Here Orson develops Joseph Smith's concept of the temple - a place where the Church would be saved with its dead in receiving an endowment of knowledge and power. Orson went on to warn the Saints against failing in the construction of the temple for fear of rejection by the Lord, citing for an example the shortcomings of the gathering project that led to Mormon expulsion from Missouri. |