Mormons themselves, is clear and without any ambiguity in his evidence on this point.
Now, having uncontradicted testimony as to the exact modus operandi whereby the world became the possessor of the original Book of Mormon, let us try to understand why a God, wholly capable of making such a wonderful revelation to mankind, should so bring it to pass that, having chosen His own agent, an admittedly uneducated youth, and having fully equipped him with mechanical appliances for translating from the Adamic characters on the golden plates into the common English tongue, by means of which appliances all human tendency to error should be absolutely eliminated, — by means of which, as the witness Reynolds states, —
there were no delays over obscure passages, no difficulties over the choice of words, no stoppages from the ignorance of the translator, no time wasted in investigation or argument over the value, intent or meaning of certain characters, and there were no references to authorities,
— let us try to understand, I repeat, why such an omnipotent and omniscient God should produce a work that, in less than threescore years, should have to receive in successive editions more than three thousand corrections in orthography and gram- mar ! Why should such a God show such illiteracy ? Elder Reynolds testifies, — let us recall him —
All was as simple as when a clerk writes from dictation. The trans- lation of the characters appeared on the Urim and Thummim, sentence by sentence, and as soon as one was correctly transcribed the next would appear.
It thus appears that Smith was amanuensis only ; the mistakes, all and each, were God's ! Necessarily so ; for Reynolds testifies that Martin Harris, the man who was Smith's first convert, was present and saw as much of the process work as God designed man — other than His prophet Joseph — to see during
that time. And yet Harris, in his testimony, says : " By aid of
AM. ANTH. N. S., I— 44
