Let me, for a little while, draw your attention to at least one of the so-called philosophical solutions of Mormonism, a scientific accounting for Joseph Smith. The work I allude to was offered to Yale University as a thesis upon which the author hoped to secure, and I think he did secure, the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy. He candidly confesses that it is an effort to account for Joseph Smith upon some other hypothesis than that he was a conscious fraud, bent on deceiving mankind. When an intelligent man makes such an announcement as that, I know, and you know, that the theories heretofore advanced to account for Joseph Smith, are unsatisfactory; that they are efforts which have failed. The theory that Joseph Smith was a conscious fraud, an imposter, has fallen to the ground. The charges frequently made and persistently urged that Mormonism had its origin in deception and conscious fraud have failed of their purpose. The floods of falsehood with which some men have sought to overwhelm Mormonism have not accomplished the end proposed. The Latter-day Saints, after more than three-quarters of a century of existence, stand above all the floods of falsehood that have been belched out against them. The work of God has not broken down, it has survived; and the Saints smilingly pity those who would make use of such contemptible means with which to combat the truth of Almighty God. Now, however, we are to be treated philosophically. And the philosophy that is advanced is, unconscious hallucination in the mind of Joseph Smith; partly unconscious and partly conscious possession of hypnotic power, by which the minds of those around him were dominated and made to see things which in reality had no existence; and while the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, and others testify of visions and voices from God honestly enough, still as a matter of fact those revelations had really no objective existence, but were mental hallucinations. And as for Joseph Smith, he was deceived by epileptic conditions. The author I am considering is at great pains to trace the ancestry of the Prophet, pointing out their mental peculiarities and supposed defects, leading up to the conclusion that these defects of mind in his ancestors culminated in epilepsy in Joseph Smith. And hence, we have as the explanation of Mormonism, epileptic fits in its Prophet, whose hallucinations are honestly mistaken for inspired visions, with partly conscious and partly unconscious hypnotic power over others! And this theory is presented seriously to one of the first institutions of learning in America as a rational explanation of how Mormonism came into existence! Ernest Renan, the French philosopher, when considering a similar hypothesis to account for the Lord Jesus Christ, overthrew all that kind of sophistry with this simple statement: