69O AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
the seer stone, sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by Martin, and when finished he would say, ' Written/ and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place ; but if not written correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used."
These three thousand changes, then, are not typographical corrections. Comparison of the first edition with the latest shows that the pronoun " which " in the first is changed to w/to in the latest, over seven hundred times. The word is constantly found, in the first edition, in such sentences as : " Those men which we sent." " And those men ivhich had been selected." " My men which had been wounded." " Our brethren which were slain." Seven hundred printer's errors in the illiterate use of the one word " which " for the relative pronoun who in a single volume ! And yet Joseph, who was without knowledge of grammar, did not have the slightest option in selecting the words. The Eng- lish words of the translation, every one of them, were set forth upon the golden page " in lieu of the strange characters engraved thereon," says the Hon. B. H. Roberts. These words Joseph would repeat, and the scribe, cut off from the prophet and his plates by a veil or curtain, would write them down. And so potent was the Urim and Thummim, that, not until the writing was correct in every particular, would the word last given yield place to its successor! Here, indeed, God took no chances for error. Here, indeed, do we find an inerrancy which is not indict- able. And yet, if this be true, the original Book of Mormon in- diets the latest edition of the Book of Mormon, published in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1891, by Geo. Q. Cannon & Sons Company, in that the said infallible first edition thus infallibly prepared, has been subjected to more than three thousand alleged " cor- rections " ! Is it credible that God, after taking such excessive pains to compel an illiterate man to transmit, without error, so
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