As to general design, and indeed as to details of plan and construction of the earlier sanctuaries, much has been preserved to us through the pages of sacred writ. From the Biblical record alone it would be possible to practically reproduce the Tabernacle of the Congregation and the later Temple of Solomon; though, had no information to supplement the Biblical account, we would know but little as to procedure requisite to the administration of ordinances specifically pertaining to temples.

Regarding the plan of building and the structural design of temples, we find no close similarity, far less of aught approaching identity, in these holy houses as erected in different dispensations; on the contrary we may affirm that direct revelation of temple plans is required for each distinctive period of the Priesthood's administration, that is to say for every dispensation of Divine authority. While the general purpose of temples is the same in all times, the special suitability of these edifices is determined by the needs of the dispensation of which they severally belong.

There is a definite sequence of development in the dealings of God with man throughout the centuries; and it is this unity of order and purpose that constitutes the eternal unchangeableness of the Supreme Being. Today is no mere repetition of yesterday; on the contrary, every today is a sum of all precedent time, so that in each succeeding age of the Divine plan is farther advanced, and the grand finale in the great drama of human salvation is brought nearer.

From the days of the ancient Tabernacle of the Congregation, and thence onward to the meridian of time, animal sacrifice was required as an ordained rite of propitiation and worship; and such was in prototype of the sacrificial death predicted as part of the mission of the Son of Man. The temples of the Hebrews who were living under the Mosaic law, provided, therefore, for the slaughter of animals, for the ceremonial dividing of carcases and for the due disposal of the blood, for the convenient immolation of the offerings, and for numerous other details of ceremony associated with worship under the law of Moses.

The Latter-day Saints are one with other Christian sects in the unreserved acceptance of the doctrine that the atoning death of Christ terminated the Mosaic rites of sacrifice involving the ceremonial shedding of blood, that, in truth, the prototype was consummated in the reality. The temples of today are provided with no altars of sacrifice, no courts of slaughter, no shambles red with the blood of beasts, no pyres on which carcases are burned, no censers of incense to becloud the fumes from burning flesh.

Even among the temples of the present dispensation there is a graded variety in the details of construction. The first temple of modern times was in a measure incomplete as compared with the holy houses of later construction. The fact was doubtless known to the Lord, though wisely hidden from common knowledge, that the Kirtland Temple would serve but for the beginning of the re-establishment of those distinctive ordinances for which temples are essential. Even as the Tabernacle of old was but an inferior type of what would follow, designed for temporary use under special conditions, so the earlier temples of the latter-day dispensation, specifically those of Kirtland and Nauvoo, were but temporary Houses of the Lord, destined to serve for short periods only as sanctuaries.