When one undertakes at this late day a serious discussion of the Spaulding theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon, he instinctively feels inclined to begin with an apology to his readers. When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's ear, and pass for an angel dictating the Koran to him, Grotius answered that there was no proof. The statement here is Carlyle's; and the gruff old Scotch philosopher adds in his sour fashion, "It is really time to dismiss all that." [1] So indeed we think of this Spaulding myth in reference to its being the origin of the Book of Mormon. [Footnote 1: "Heroes and Hero Worship," by Thomas Carlyle, lecture II.] When the Church of which the Book of Mormon may be said, in a way, to have been the origin has survived the most cruel religious persecution of modern times, first in the expulsion of from twelve to fifteen thousand of its members from the state of Missouri; and, second, in the murder of its first prophet in Illinois, followed by the expatriation of between twenty and thirty thousand of its members from the territory of the United States; when that religious movement to which the Book of Mormon may be said to have given the first impulse, and is now a continuous, sustaining factor, has resulted in the founding of a number of American commonwealths in the inter-mountain country of the United States; [2] when that people who accept the Book of Mormon as a divine revelation have established, for an extent of well nigh three thousand miles through the plateau valleys of the Rocky Mountains--from the province of Alberta, Canada, to the states of Chihuahua and Sonora in the republic of Mexico--no less than between seven and nine hundred settlements, many of them prosperous towns of large manufacturing as well as of large agriculture and trade interests; when that same people have won world-wide renown as superior colonizers, and are eagerly sought for in such enterprises because of their well known sobriety, honesty, frugality and industry; when that same people are quietly building up an educational system including as it does the rounding of universities in its principal centers, and academies elsewhere as feeders to the central educational institutions; [3] when those who accept the Book of Mormon as a divine revelation continuously sustain a corps of missionaries, numbering from fifteen to eighteen hundred, to carry their message to the world, and these missionaries are at work in nearly all civilized nations, and in the islands of the Pacific, meeting their own expenses and manifesting the unselfishness of their faith by their works--their service for God and fellowman; when the Book of Mormon itself has been accepted in the first three-quarters of a century of its existence by hundreds of thousands of earnest people of average intelligence and certainly of independent character; when