Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 August 1884 — Service in the Mormon Tabernacle. [ARTICLE]

Service in the Mormon Tabernacle.

Service in the Tabernacle is held on Sundays at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The Saints assemble not only from the city, but irom all the country round, and many vehicles of all sorts are left standing in the neighborhood. The center of the church fills rapidly with women, while men predominate in the side rows of seats. There are seats for 13,000 persons in the amphitheater and gallery, and many more crowd in at some of the great conferences. A broad gallery closes around at the front, where the choir sit in two wings, sac ng each other, the men on one side and the women opposite. The space between is filled by three long crimsoncushioned pulpit desks, in each of whicli twenty speakers or so can sit at once, each rank overlooking the heads of the one beneath. The highest was designed for the president and his two counselors; the second one for the twelve apostles, and the lowest for the bishops, but I believe the order is not very rigidly observed.

The acoustic properties of the house are almost perfect. A former deficiency of light hasbeen overcome by the use of electricity; and the chilling bareness of the huge whitewashed vault is relieved by hangings of evergreen and flowers made of tissue-paper, the effect of which is very good indeed. Every Sunday the sacrament is administered, the table loaded with baskets of bread and tankards of water occupying a dais at the foot of the pulpits. Gradually a number of bishops take their places behind this table, and watch the congregation gather, people coming in through the dozen or moi’e side doors as though the Tabernacle was a huge sponge absorbing the population of the Territory. Mingling with f;he rest come many strangers, bringing the latest tailoring and millinery, and these strangers are always conducted to seats down in front, -\Vhere they can be addressed effectively in a body. At one door stands a huge cask of cold water, with several tin cups handy, and nearly all stop to drink as they come in. Later you will see tin pails holding a quart or more, and having handles on both sides, circulating through the audience, and filled from time to time by small Ganymedes running about in chip hats and well-starched pinafores. Precisely at 2 o’clock the great organ sends forth its melodious summons, and the noise of busy voices—the hum of the veritable boney-bees of Deseret in their home hive—is hushed. A hymn is announced (by some brother in a business coat whom you will meet in trade to-morrow, perhaps) and sung by the choir, for though the tune may be one of the old familiar ones, the audience does not join in the singiug. Jhe music of the Tabernacle has a great reputation in the West, and it would hardly be fair to decry it because it does not come up to a* New York performance. It is conspicuously good for the material at hand and the locality. The organ, a handsome instrument, nearly as large as the great organ in the Boston Music Hall, is not so readily discounted, however, and is played with much skill, to the constant delight of the people. After the singing comes a long prayer by a layman priest, and a hymn, during the singing of which eight bishops break the slices of bread into morsels. Then, while the bread is being passed through the audience to the communicants—everybody, old and young, partaking—President Taylor or some other dignitary reads a chapter from the Bible, usually from Revelation, and makes extempore remarks apon it. Sometimes the lion. George Q. Cannon, the most eminent of the Mormon leaders, occupies the pulpit. It is 3 o’clock before the bread and water have been partaken of by all, and fully 4by the time the preacher has ceased, the bishop pronounced the benediction, and the congregation is dismissed. As the people scatter about the great dusty yard, picking their way among the blocks of stone awaiting their place in the Temple, one sees how largely foreigners they are, the predominant nationalities being British and Scandinavian. Their peasantry, too, is unmistakably stamped upon their faces, though they have changed their foreign characteristics for a rusticity of the American type. Among the most prominent of the Mormon apostles are Orson Pratt, the most distinguished scholar and writer in the sect, and Joseph F. Smith, a nephew of the original Prophet and founder of Mormonism.— Ernest Ingersoll, in Harper’s Magazine.