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 by two mysterious presences. One of them proved to be God, for "pointing"—probably in the rustic village manner, by way of introduction—to the other stranger, he said: "This is my beloved son, hear him." At this interview God bore it in upon Joseph's mind that He had no true church in the world, and confided various other matters which were not then, as Mr. Werner puts it, "released for publication."

Joseph, for a time, went on with the ungodly life of a Vermont villager. But he meditated on these things. He also, it is reported, studied the memoirs of the itinerant clerical scalawag, Stephen Burroughs, and the autobigraphy of Captain Kidd. Kidd seems to have set his mind running on buried treasure, and Burroughs on the undeveloped resources of heaven, open to exploitation by an enterprising Yankee. When his family moved to western New York, then the asylum of footloose religions, he went out on a treasure hunting expedition. On Cumnorah Hill, near Palmyra, in 1830 he dug up the famous gold plates, subsequently returned to heaven, on which the book of Mormon was written. Together with them he found the "celestial spectacles," called Urim and Thummim, with the aid of which he was able to translate the "Reformed Egyptian" of the original "caractors" into somewhat broken Elizabethan English. God directed him to get the book printed and to offer it for sale at $1.75, but later advised that the price be lowered to $1.25.

Non-Mormon analyists of this book and of Joseph Smith's other translations from the "Reformed Egyptian" writings of Abraham, etc., regard them on the whole as very puerile flummery, full of ignorance, superstition and absurd anachronisms. I think they are. They were written before the Mormons had done any