692 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [x. s., I, 1S99
the Mormons. He was not a backwoodsman ; He should have known what Joseph did not, and should have kept, as the Hon. B. H. Roberts, member-elect of the LVIth Congress, says He could not help doing, the Urim and Thummim on the golden plates until the Day of Judgment even, rather than have permit- ted the first one of those three thousand and odd mistakes to find its way into the manuscript of the Book of Mormon, so care- fully prepared and printed by the " author and proprietor " in 1830.
Let us conclude this examination with one more point of evi- dence taken from the original Book of Mormon. As the title-page shows, this book purports to be an abridgment of the records of a certain Lehi, who, with his family and certain others, people of Nephi and also the Lamanites, came from Jerusalem to America 600 B.C. They brought with them a body of gold plates contain- ing the Old Testament Scriptures up to that time engraved thereon. These plates, of the greatest anthropological and ethno- logical interest, were wonderfully " hidden up " in a hillside in New York state and in due time revealed and translated by a special providence of God. So, for any portions of the Old Test- ament Scriptures which might happen to be contained in the Book of Mormon, we have a much more perfect translation than for the same portions as translated out of the original Hebrew by the rules of ordinary philology. These portions are not only better than the corresponding portions of the Bible, but they are absolutely perfect, if the Hon. B. H. Roberts is to be regarded as a veracious historian. Hence, if we wish to see how correctly the Hebrew Bible has been translated, a comparison of these parts would inform us. I quote from Lamoni Call's " Reasons for Making the Changes," (page 119) :
There are thirty-eight pages in the Book of Mormon which are also in the Bible. Six and one-half of these are the sermon on the mount, which Christ delivered in America almost exactly as he did in Jerusa- lem. The third and fourth chapters of Malachi He quoted to them ;
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