During the month of March of the present year a sectarian minister of high standing in our community preached several discourses in Salt Lake City--three, I think--against the third book of Nephi, contained in the Book of Mormon. This third Nephi the reverend gentleman has happily called the "Fifth Gospel." I am sorry that descriptive term did not occur to me, or to some other Elder in Israel. Had I coined the title I should have been very proud of it, for I think it a most fortunate one. Of course, the other four gospels are contained in our Hebrew scriptures. They are the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We speak of them as the four gospels. And this reverend gentleman refers to III Nephi as the "Fifth Gospel." I call it the "American Gospel," for I so regard it. Of course, after stating the title the gentleman then questions the book's right to it. The subject of his three discourses is the consideration of the question whether this Nephite book is worthy to be classed at all with the four gospels of the Hebrew scriptures. He decides the question on the negative. I shall not attempt in the remarks I make tonight to deal with all three of the gentleman's discourses. I shall content myself with alluding to one, and that the third, called "Gospels, Apocryphal and Real." A word of explanation about the term "apocryphal gospels." During the first and second centuries of the Christian era there was a world of myth and legend that grew out of the history of the Savior. The four gospels leave undescribed, as you know, his infancy and youth. Between the time his earthly guardians took up their residence at Nazareth in his infancy to the time when he commenced his public ministry--in all that period we get but one glimpse of him, that was when he was twelve years of age, and then we learn of him being in the temple disputing with the doctors--doctors of philosophy and doctors of theology--both asking and answering questions. What sober history failed to record fable and legend sought to supply, hence we have a collection of books called the Apocryphal New Testament, that deals with him and his sojourn in Egypt and in his childhood days called the Gospel of the Infancy, two books; the Gospel of the Birth of Mary, a number of epistles--about fifteen or twenty books, all told. They are so extravagant in statement, so wonder-creating in their nature, that they are generally discredited by Christians and called "apocryphal" books about Jesus and the early days of Christianity. Our reverend friend classes the "Fifth Gospel" with this order of apocryphal books, and says that it deserves no higher rank than those books to which I have here briefly alluded.