Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/20

* MOBMONS. brifrhfness of the sun. wliuli descended frradiially until it fell upon me. When the light rested upon me. 1 saw two per.«iona<;tes whose brifrhtness and glory defy all description, staniling above me in the air. One of them spake unto me. . . . When I came to myself again 1 foimd myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven." The second of the 'visions of .Joseph' took place on September 21, 182.3, when the heavenly messenger disclosed the hiding place of the gold plates upon which the Book of Mormon was asserted to be engraved. There was a series of seven visions in all, which extend over as many years, and which, as in the ease of Mo- hanuned. have been attributed by some to epilepsy. Connected with these trances is the so-called "transcription of the gold plates." As a money- digger among Indian mounds young Smith made use of a 'peek-stone.' This became the famous 'Urim and Tbuminim.' whereby ".To.seph the Seer translated the reformed Egyptian of the plates of Xephi." Students of abnormal psychology infer from recent investigation of the original document with its sprawling superscription 'Car- actors' that it is analogous to the automatic writing of the semi-hypnotized crj'stal gazer, and urge that Smith's later methods of 'translating' bear out this supposition of a sub-conscious activity. Throwing himself into a condition of revery by gazing into his 'interpreters,' he dictated to his scribes what appeared to him to bo communications of supernatural origin. Such an interpretation of .To.seph's visions in terms of abnormal psychology is thought blasphemous by the Saints. They hold the records to be divinely inspired, while Smith compared his peculiar psychic experiences to those of Saint Paul. Of Smith's writings the first was the Book of Mor- mon, begun in September, 1827, at Manchester, N'. Y., continued at Harmony, Pa., and finished at Fayette. N. V., .hine, l"82n. The original manuscript has disappeared. There remains only a duplicate made by Smith's principal scribe, the schoolmaster Oliver Cowdery. 'fhe first edition was printed at Palmyra in 1830. Two other editions were published within ten years. The fifteen books of this "Sacred History of An- cient America from the Earliest Ages After the Flood to the Beginning of the Fifth Century of the Christian Era" Smith himself thus sunimari/j'd : "The historj' of America is unfolded from its fir.st settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel to the iM'ginning of the fifth cen- tury of the Christian Era. We are informed by these records that America, in ancient times, has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called .laredites, and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came diri'ctly from the city of .Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. The .laredites were destroyed about the lime that the Israelites came from .lerusalem. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle toward the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians. This b(x>k also tells us that our Saviour made His appearance upon this continent after His resurrection; that He planted the Gospel here in all its fullness nn<l richness and power and blessing; that they ha<l apostles, prophets, pas- tors, t<'acliers, and evangelists; the .same order, the same priestlio<Ml, the same ordinances, gifts, powers, and blessing, as was enjoyed on the 8 MORMONS. Eastern Continent : that the people were cut off in consequence of their transgressions; that the last of their prophets who existed among them was commanded to write an al)ridgment of their prophecies, history, etc., and to hide it up in the earth." Certain adverse critics dismiss the Book of Mormon as a mere hodge-podge of [letty infor- mation, gross anachronisms, and biblical bor- rowings; this, in the opinion of another class of adverse critics, is to miss its significance both as a cryptic biography and as a characteristic bit of provincial Americana. The latter declare that in addition to private affairs inadvertently incorporated there are water marks of some his- toric interest to be foimd in the document. They detect, in Scriptural paraphrase, descriptions of the current agitations against Romanism, infi- delity, and Freemasonry, and even references to the so-called Washingtonian movement for total abstinence. The widely prevalent theory that the Indians were the lost ten tribes of Israel is also embodied. The Xephites were not merely the modern red men in disguise, but in their men- tal habits they intimately resembled local sec- tarians. The speech of Nephi contains quotations from the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the speech of Lehi reflects the heretical tenets charged against the Presbytery of Geneva, in whose bounds Jo.sepb himself lived. Applying the methods of the higher criticism, unbelievers note that the book is filled with the catch- words of the Jlethodist camp-meeting e.xliorter, and cite in particular the last section of the Book of Mormon, fnmi its likeness to a Methodist book of discipline, as final proof of the writer's dependence on local theology. Believing the Book of Mormon to be the veritable word of God de- livered through verbal inspiration, the Mormon apologists consider it unwarrantable to apjily the higher criticism to their bible. Nevertheless such criticism renders untenable previous argu- ments against the authenticity of the work. The ideas in the book were within the young author's ken. His Calvinism need not have been formally derived from the 'New Knijland Primer, nor his arguments on Deism from Thomas Paine's A<ie of Reason, since the backwoods pulpit and the political gossip of the taverns supplied these notions. If the internal evidence makes the Book of Mormon indigenoiis, the external evi- dence is equally against a foreign authorship as presented in the ordinary Spaulding-Rigdon theory. This is, briefiy, that a romance of pre- historic America, written in Ohio in 1812 by a Congregational minister, Solomon Spaulding, was the 'source, root, and inspiration' by which Smith's associate, Sidney Rigdon, concocted the scheme of a Golden Bible. The recovery in 188i5 of the alleged original of Spaulding's "Manu- script Story" has been to the Mormons ccmclu- sive proof of its non-connection with the Book of .Mormon, for there is no real resemblance be- tween the two. The day of the founding of the Mormon Church was April 0, 1830. On that day Smith claimed to have received a revelation beginning: "Thou shall be called a seer, a translator, .a prophet, an apostle." This is a characteristic sentence from the second half of the Mormon canon, the Book of Commandments. This rarest of original Mormon sources is in part a book of discipline, containing the "Articles and Cove-