Paradise Reclaimed by Halldor Laxness

At this stage the management of the Mormon mission to Iceland had been transferred from Denmark to Scotland; that is where the headquarters were, as one puts it nowadays, but in the past it would have been called the archiepiscopal seat. At this seat there was a school at which Mormon priests were trained in the technique of preaching the Gospel in the new fashion to Gentiles of other lands. Stone P. Stanford was sent over there from Utah to study for a winter before he went to Iceland to succeed Bishop Þjóðrekur and other saints who had gone there. The bricklayer is reported to have said later that there he had learned theology with the part of the head that begins above the nose; whereas until then he had drunk it through the nose, like snuff from a wooden horn.

No further matters of theology or holy doctrine will be recounted here at present; the bricklayer himself, indeed, has said that nothing in the instruction at the archiepiscopal school there in Scotland surpassed the propositions that Pastor Runólfur had preached, and which have already been rendered in this little book. The story now moves on to a day when the birds were tuning up their songs in the trees there in the newly-green slope under Edinburgh Castle. Nearby lies Princes Street, which is broad and sunny and moistened with wholesome showers, more so than most city streets in the world, with the exception of the streets in the aforementioned God's City of Zion, which were measured and laid out according to the principles of the All-Wisdom.