George Q. Cannon — Prophecy of the Hawaiian Temple

In December 1900, President George Q. Cannon of the First Presidency returned to the islands where, as a 23-year-old missionary fifty years earlier, he had helped open the Hawaiian Mission and begun translating the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian. He came to commemorate the mission's golden jubilee — the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the first Latter-day Saint missionaries — and spoke many times during the festivities.

At Laie, as reported by Mission President Samuel E. Woolley, Cannon told the Saints "if they would be faithful enough that the time would come when some would be given the power to seal husband and wife for time and eternity so that their children would be born under the New and Everlasting Covenant." A week later he spoke to the same subject in Honolulu. Cannon himself recorded the trip in a journal he titled Journal of Travels to the Hawaiian Mission Jubilee. As historian R. Lanier Britsch concluded, "taken together, these expressions of President Cannon gave rise to the tradition that he had prophesied that a temple would be built in Hawai'i."

The words were more than wishful sentiment. Elder John A. Widtsoe, reviewing the evidence in 1916, affirmed that Cannon had declared that "he believed the time was near at hand when the temple ordinances would be enjoyed by the people of the Hawaiian Islands." Cannon's words stood on earlier witnesses as well: at the Sandwich Islands missionaries' October 1852 conference, Frances A. Hammond recorded an interpretation of tongues declaring that the Hawaiian people "would be built up on these islands, and... a temple will be built in this land"; and in 1864 William W. Cluff, walking the Laie shoreline, received a vision in which Brigham Young declared to him: "This is the place, and upon this land we will build a temple unto our God."

The fulfillment came within a generation. On June 1, 1915, President Joseph F. Smith was moved upon to dedicate the very ground at Laie for a temple. The Laie Hawaii Temple was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1919 — the first temple built outside the continental United States. In his dedicatory prayer, President Heber J. Grant expressly thanked the Father "that the promise made in a dream to thy servant, William W. Cluff, by the prophet, Brigham Young, that the day would come when a temple should be erected in this land is fulfilled before our eyes." For the Hawaiian Saints, the temple on the rise at Laie stood as the answer to George Q. Cannon's jubilee words.