LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER V.

       THE FIRST SABBATH IN THE VALLEY. THE PIONEERS APPLY THE PROPHECIES TO THEMSELVES AND THEIR LOCATION. ZION HAS GONE UP INTO THE MOUNTAINS. THEY LOCATE THE TEMPLE AND LAY OFF THE "CITY OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE." THE LEADERS RETURN TO WINTER QUARTERS TO GATHER THE BODY OF THE CHURCH.

      The arrival of the main body of the Pioneers in the valley of the Great Salt Lake was on a Saturday. The next day to them was a Sabbath indeed.

      "We shaved and cleaned up," says Apostle Woodruff, in his graphic story of the Pioneers, "and met in the circle of the encampment."

      In the afternoon the whole " Congregation of Israel" partook of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

      Then the valleys rang with the exultant themes of the Hebrew Prophets, and the "everlasting hills" reverberated to the hosannas of the Saints.

      Orson Pratt was the preacher of the great subject, which, to the ardent faith of those Pioneers, never lived in fulfillment till that moment. The sublime flights of the matchless Isaiah gave the principal theme.

      "O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountains!"

      But Isaiah is not alone in the culminating inspiration. There is such a grand unity among the Hebrew prophets, when touching this subject of a Latter-day Zion, that undoubtedly, it was the burden of the divine epic to which the Hebraic genius soared. Notwithstanding the mental diversity of these poet-prophets, in this crowning theme they gave us, not poetic fragments, but a glorious continued composition, as from a manifold genius.

      "Thy watchmen shall lift up their voice; with the voice together shall they sing; and they shall see eye to eye when they Lord shall bring again Zion."

      This was fulfilled to those Anglo-American Pioneers on that day. They felt they were the watchmen! With the voice together they sang the theme and did literally shout their hosannas. They saw eye to eye. "The Lord hath brought again Zion."

      Nor were these Mormon Apostles figurative in their applications; they rendered most literally to themselves every point. Orson Pratt declared, with an Apostle's assurance, that their location, in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, was in the view of the ancient seers. That which was before seemingly contradictory in the extreme, relative to the Latter-day Zion, especially its location and the rapid transformation of its founding, was now made plain and most literal.

      Apostle Pratt reconciled it all. The Pioneers saw the vision of Zion harmonized on that first Sabbath in the valley, as they might have seen their own faces in a mirror.

      God would "hide his people in the chambers of the mountains!" Yet, in these "last days" he would "establish his house on the tops of the mountains and exalt it above the hills!"

      And here were these Pioneers of Mormon Israel in a valley nearly thirty miles in diameter, encircled by a chain of mountains; here, in a valley nearly five thousand feet above the level of the sea—"exalted above the hills"—yet belted by mountains with everlasting caps of snow. It was indeed as the "chambers of the Lord," and the name which it popularly bore—the "Great Basin "—was nearly as striking to the imagination as its prophetic name.

      Latter-day Zion, too, was to be a place "sought out"—a place "not forsaken." They had sought it out by an exodus, and an unparalleled journey of a people, nearly fifteen hundred miles, over unbroken prairies, sandy deserts, and rocky mountains; and they were about to found their Zion in a primeval valley, where no city, since the creation, had ever stood—a place "not forsaken" by civilized people of the ages long since dead. The " solitary places" were to be "made glad," the " wilderness" was to "blossom as the rose," and the " desert" suddenly to be converted into the " fruitful field." Such was the sermon of the first Sabbath in the Great Salt Lake Valley. The Pioneers had chosen for the location of their Zion and her temples, the "Great American Desert," and they were about to make real the strange and highly colored picture. So much like the change in an enchanted scene has been the transformation which has since come over those desert valleys and canyons of the Rocky Mountains, that for the last quarter of a century the Mormons have been popularly described in nearly every nation of the earth as that peculiar people who have made the "desert to blossom as the rose." Look upon the valley of the Salt Lake today as the Spring opens, when the gardens and orchards are in one universal rose blossom, and there never was a prophetic picture more literally realized.

      Though feeble with that most languishing of diseases, the mountain fever, and scarcely able to stand upon his feet, Brigham Young was still the law-giver on that first Sabbath. If he had not the strength to preach a great sermon on the Latter-day Zion, like that of the Mormon Paul—Orson Pratt—he was "every inch" the Moses of the Mormon Exodus.

      "He told the brethren," says the historian Woodruff, "that they must not work on Sunday; that they would lose five times as much as they would gain by it. None were to hunt or fish on that day; and there should not any man dwell among us who would not observe these rules.

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