to conceive as a guide in married life than, "As the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands. And husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church."

Chicago, Illinois.

EMMA G. WILBUR.

III. MORMONISM.1

On the 22d day of September, in the year of our Lord 1805, Joseph Smith was born at Sharon, Windsor County, Vermont, of poor, ignorant, thriftless and not over honest parents. Along with them he removed, ten years later, to a poor farm in the western part of the State of New York, where he reproduced the shiftlessness, ignorance, meanness and dishonesty of his parents in his own character. For years in his youth and early manhood he spent much of the time in befooling men and defrauding them, by pretending that through the aid of a marvelous stone which he possessed he could discover hidden treasures, gold mines and the like. For such practices he was brought before a justice of the peace in Bainbridge, Chenango County, New York, on the 20th day of March, 1826, and adjudged guilty of being a disorderly person and an impostor.

Meanwhile the region in which he lived had been visited by a religious revival when he was about fifteen years of age, and his own mind had been wildly agitated.

Under the influence of this religious excitement several members of the Smith family joined the Presbyterian Church. But Joseph was more inclined to the Methodists. He tells us that he prayed much to be guided aright; that he was greatly perplexed by the numbers and varieties of the sects; and that he saw none that seemed to be correct. He would have us believe that like Mohammed, whom he more nearly resembled in the ethical features of his teaching than any other with whom we could compare him, he was dissatisfied with any form of Christianity which he knew, on the one hand, and equally dissatisfied on the other with Judaism as he saw it.

1This paper was read before the student body of Union Theological Seminary in the month of March, last. There have been several requests for its publication.

He tells us, also, that he began to see visions from this time on, and that in one of these visions, which occurred on the night of the 21st of September, 1823, the angel Moroni appeared to him three times, and told him that the Bible of the Western Continent, the supplement to the New Testament, was buried near the adjacent town of Manchester, and that thither in 1827, after the necessary disciplinary probation, he went and received from the Lord a stone box, in which was a volume six inches thick, made of thin gold plates 8 inches by 7, and fastened together by three rings; that the plates were covered with small writing in the "reformed Egyptian" tongue, and that there was with them a pair of supernatural spectacles, in the shape of two crystals set in a silver bow, and called "Urim and Thummim." As the illiterate Smith could write with difficulty he employed as amanuensis Oliver Cowdery, to whom from behind a curtain he dictated, as he claimed, a translation of the unsealed contents of the plates. With the aid of a farmer of some means, Martin Harris, the copy thus produced by Oliver Cowdery was printed and published in 1830 under the title of "The Book of Mormon."

It was prefaced by the sworn statement of Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris, that an angel of God had shown them the plates of which the book was a translation.

This book-the so-called "Book of Mormon"-in which Joseph Smith is declared to be God's prophet, with all power, and entitled to all obedience, tells us that certain Hebrews settled in America in 600 B. C.; that they subsequently divided over a question of leadership, and that the victorious party, which was also the party of insubordination to God, suffered the darkening of their skins as a curse for their insubordination and became the red Indians of America. It tells us that subsequently the party of the servants of the Lord became still smaller through apostasy and that finally it was destroyed by the Indian Hebrews in

the year 384, A. D.; but that among the few who escaped destruction were Mormon and his son Moroni; that Mormon collected the sixteen books of records, kept by successive kings and priests, into one volume, and that Moroni supplemented the work of Mormon by some personal reminiscences and then hid the volume in the hill of Cumorah, being assured of its going, one day, to be discovered by God's chosen prophet.

Such is the account of the water-wizzard, the cheat and the fraud, Joseph Smith, as to the origin of the "Book of Mormon." In a part of this account he was at first supported by the sworn statement of his three friends, Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris. But some years later, all three of these renounced Mormonism and denounced their oaths as false.

There is little reason for believing that Joseph Smith ever was as profoundly agitated on the subject of religion as he professed; there is still less reason for believing that he made an intelligent study of either Christianity or Judaism and thus intelligently rejected them as insufficient. There is the best evidence for believing that the "Book of Mormon" came not through angelic ministrations, but in quite a different way.

The most of this book was written by an invalid and crack-brained Presbyterian preacher, Solomon Spalding, by name, to while away the tedious hours of his invalid years. He had been accustomed to maintain that the Indians of America were descendants of some of the Israelitish tribes, and in a period of infirm health he wrote a romance to support his views. He called his work the "Manuscript Found," and tried, but in vain, to find a publisher. This work fell into the hands of Smith, and after some slight manipulations, came out the "Book of Mormon."

That Spalding's romance was the original of the "Book of Mormon" was the confident affirmation of contemporaries of Joseph Smith, who had examined both books. And

these men not only asserted such a relation between the "Manuscript Found" and the "Book of Mormon," but they proved it by pointing to numerous and distinctive names, phrases and characters in Spalding's manuscript which re-appear as distinctive features in Smith's work. And so strong do they make their case that Gentile historians of Mormonism generally, and perhaps universally, agree in taking this view of the origin of the so-called "Book of Mormon."

Joseph Smith gave his people not only the "Book of Mormon." In 1830 he claimed to have received another revelation proclaiming him "seer, translator, prophet, apostle of Jesus Christ, and elder of the Church." The revelations thus begun continued to his death, in 1844. They include that which sanctions polygamy and which was privately given in the year 1843 to pacify his lawful wife and to silence the objections of the saints to his living with a number of women whom he had persuaded to worse than polygamous relations. For reasons of policy this revelation was not published abroad for ten years, until 1853. These revelations to Smith, together with one to Brigham Young, written and published by him at "Winter Quarters," in the year 1847, to inspire and guide the saints in their projected western pilgrimage through the wilderness, were collected and published under the title of the "Book of Doctrine and Covenants."

Ah, suppose an up-to-date "Book of Doctrine and Covenants" would to-day include one or two other revelations, as for instance, one which, while still justifying polygamy as ethically proper, advised its cessation as a condition necessary in order to the admission of Utah to the Statehood!

These are the two distinctive books of the Mormons. They comprise their "inspired writings," which as "modern revelations," they place alongside the ancient scriptures "properly translated," contained in the Old and