woods. He said that God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son had appeared to him, and had declared to him that his sins were forgiven, that God had chosen him to restore his kingdom on earth and propagate anew the truth of the gospel which all christendom had lost. In 1823 Smith, forgetting his revelations and his pretended divine mission, plunged as deep as ever in blasphemy, fraud, drunkenness and other vices. Then, he said, an angel appeared to him and revealed the existence of a book written on gold plates and containing the history of the ancient inhabitants of America. This is the origin of the "Book of Mormon," or Golden Bible, the Koran of these Mahometans. The next day Smith visited the spot designated by the angel as the spot where the book was. This was on the slope of a hill between Palmyra and Manchester. There he pretended to find in fact golden plates in a stone box; but this time his efforts to raise them were vain. There was, he says, a great contest between the devil and the angels as to it; but although the devil was beaten, the angel did not give the book to Smith, who received it only four years after, on the 22d of September, 1827.
The Book of Mormon, like the Koran, is a tissue of contradictory plagiarisms and absurd inventions. The whole is interlarded with passages fromtheBible. Ithasbeenproved that the portion given as historical is merely a plagiary of a romance of Solomon Spalding whose manuscript had been stolen by Smith. Spalding had written, under the title of The Discovered Manuscript, a romance on the- origin of the American Indians. He died before publishing it. After his death his widow removed to New York and Smith is known to have worked near her house. Some time after the publication of the Book of Mormon she discovered the loss of her husband's manuscript. Many of Spalding's relatives and friends detected The Discovered Manuscript,slightly altered, in Smith's book. Spalding had been in the habit of reading long passages from his novel; the singularity of the facts, names and style, which was biblical, had so struck them 89