Religion: A View of the Pacific

And in the process of time, the shores of the Pacific may yet be overlooked from the Temple of the Lord.

—Brigham Young

This week, 106 years after he wrote them, the words of the great patriarch of the Latter-day Saints came abundantly true. Some, 6,000 Mormons, led by President David O. McKay and ten of the Church's twelve Apostles, assembled atop a Los Angeles hill to lay the cornerstone of the largest (and eleventh) Mormon temple ever built.

The faithful looked with pride at the massive Mayan-style building, covered with cast panels of cement and Wasatch crushed rock, which overlooks the Pacific on...