unchanging, unwavering course, continuing over fifty years, consistent with a deliberate, premeditated and cunningly-devised and executed fraud!" [145] [Footnote 145: "Myth of the Manuscript Found," (1883) pp. 35-6.] The last matter of argument in the quotation above, the unwavering adherence of the witnesses to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the relationship they sustained to that work, has peculiar force when applied to the case of Sidney Rigdon. He claims to have known nothing of the Book of Mormon until it was presented to him (as we shall see later by a statement of his) by Parley P. Pratt and Oliver Cowdery, some six months after its publication. But let us suppose for the sake of the argument, that he really took the part assigned to him by Mr. Schroeder in bringing into existence the Book of Mormon; that he stole the Spaulding "Manuscript Found" about 1816; that hearing of Smith through Pratt, he then sent the said manuscript to Smith to be announced as a revelation from God; that afterwards he collaborated with Smith to produce the Book of Mormon out of it. It will go without saying that a thief, and especially such a thief as Rigdon is here represented to be, is a very ignoble character; and it will not be too much to say that if such a character is hard pressed by his associates, or is, what he might consider, ill treated by them, he will very-probably betray them. Sidney Rigdon certainly considered himself both hard pressed and positively wronged by his brethren--but he never "revealed" the "fraud" in which Mormonism is supposed to have had its origin. Joseph Smith sought to be rid of him as his counselor at the October Conference of 1843. He directly charged Rigdon with treachery, of being leagued with his deadly enemies, and that he had no confidence in his "integrity and steadfastness;" that Rigdon had been profitless to him as a counselor since their escape from Missouri in 1839. By virtue of a vigorous denial on the part of Rigdon as to some of the charges, and a plea for mercy as to some delinquencies confessed, he was sustained by the conference in his office of counselor to the Prophet, notwithstanding the latter was not satisfied with the conclusion of the matter reached by the conference. "I have thrown him off my shoulders," said he, "and you have again put him upon me. You may carry him, but I will not." [146] [Footnote 146: _Millenial Star_, Vol. 22, pp. 215-16.]