weak, ignorant man, assumed the authority to select a few, which, according to his frail judgment, he believed or conjected were of God; but the balance not agreeing, perhaps, with his peculiar notion of divine inspiration, were rejected as spurious. The few selected from the abundance were finally arranged into one volume, divided into chapter and verse, and named the Bible."
Again:
"How does the Protestant world know that the compilers of the Bible, in hunting up the sacred manuscripts which were widely scattered over the world, one in one place, and another in another, found all that were of divine origin? How do they know that the compilers of the Bible found even the one hundredth part of the manuscripts that were sacred?"—"Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon." p. 130.
As Orson Pratt was one of Smith's chosen apostles his utterances show the true spirit of Mormon inspiration. Why should Mormons make such attacks upon the Bible? The answer is, Unless the Bible can be brought into disrepute there can be no room for the Book of Mormon. We will first see what foundation there is for such infidel attacks upon the Old Testament. In the days of Christ and the apostles that book existed in two languages. The Hebrew and the Greek. We have a copy of the Septuagint version. It was a translation from the Hebrew, made in Alexandria, Egypt, about 200 years before Christ. It contains the books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi. This shows that the Hebrew version contained the same. Christ and his apostles used them, and endorsed them as the word of God. They were such, or Christ and his apostles were false teachers. In this we have the inspiration of Jesus, versus Mormon inspiration. They cannot both be true.
"Suppose a merchant in San Francisco receive a large order from a firm in Liverpool for several cargoes of wheat. He goes to the Merchant's Intelligence Office and satisfies himself that the Liverpool house is perfectly solvent. But he has never had any correspondence with that house before, and so does not certainly know that the signature is genuine. Just then one of his neighbors whom he knows to be a true man, and who has
