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Show Page 276 St. George to attend the dedication of the temple there. The elderly President of the Church had established residence there and called the general conference for the southern settlement which Orson had helped pioneer. A peculiar excitement could be felt in St. George at the arrival of the authorities, compounded by the execution, only days before, of a certain John D. Lee, for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The new temple shattered the eye with its walls of white stucco, so like the battlements of the House of the Lord at Nauvoo. Orson preached the first day in the new assembly room, invoking the ardent romance of the Kirtland dedications, showing forth the greater blessings of Nauvoo 19 with its washings, anointings, and endowments. He then listened, probably with a touch of disquiet, to the curious sermons given by Brigham Young, rambling and long in the avuncular voice of age; the Prophet seemed peculiarly obsessed with the identity of Adam, investing 20 the first man, in words few could interpret, with divine fatherhood. If Orson heard doctrinal aberrations that day from Brigham Young, he kept it, ironically, to himself. The house at St. George signified for Orson the re-opening of the great celestial school of progress begun so many years before in Kirtland. Another such edifice would rise far to the north, where, a few weeks later Orson knelt on a muddy hill in Logan to sanctify the broken ground for a 21 third Utah temple. And on July 18, 1877, Orson left Utah for the first time in eight years. Weighted with scripture revision and the work of the Historian's Office, Orson had enjoyed an unusually long respite between missions. He had passed eighteen of his sixty-five years as a wanderer for the New Dispensation among the hostile nations of Europe and America - now Brigham Young was anxious that the revised canon of the Church be published, |