Latter Day Saints; United States -- Description and travel
This was the expedient to which they resorted in order to avoid replacing
the lost pages. Had those pages, however, been transcribed verbatim from
Mr. Spaulding's manuscript, they would undoubtedly have re-produced them,
and urged the fact of their being able to do so as a still further proof of
their divine inspiration. But on the supposition that there was
considerable new matter mingled up with Mr. Spaulding's sketches, it would
be impossible for them to produce the one hundred and sixteen pages just as
they were before, and they would therefore naturally devise some expedient
to relieve themselves from the necessity of re-producing those pages. In
all probability Cowdery, and Smith, and Rigdon, had all more or less to do
in combining these additional parts with Mr. Spaulding's work.
The origin of this work of Mr. Spaulding, to which I refer, and which
unquestionably forms the entire ground-work of the BOOK OF MORMON, is thus
described by Mrs. Davison, formerly the wife of Mr. Spaulding. This
statement of Mrs. Davison was published some time last winter in the Boston
Recorder, to the editors of which it was sent by the Rev. John Storrs, the
Congregational minister in Hollistown, accompanied with a certificate from
two highly respectable clergymen, the Rev. Mr. Austin and the Rev. A. Ely,
D. D., residing in Monson, Mass., the present place of residence of Mrs.
Davison,--stating that Mrs. Davison, the narrator of the following
history, was formerly the wife of Rev. Solomon Spaulding, and that since
his decease she had been married to a second husband by the name of
Davison, and that she was a woman of irreproachable character, and a humble
Christian, and that her testimony was worthy of implicit confidence.
"As the 'BOOK OF MORMON' or 'GOLDEN BIBLE' has excited much attention, and
has been put by a certain new sect in the place of the Sacred Scriptures, I
deem it a duty which I owe to the public, to state what I know touching its
origin. That its claims to a divine origin are wholly unfounded, needs no
proof to a mind unperverted by the grossest delusions. That any sane person
should rank it higher than any other merely human composition, is a matter
of the greatest astonishment; yet it is received as divine by some who
dwell in enlightened New England, and by those who have sustained the
character of devoted Christians. Learning recently that Mormonism had found
its way into a church in Massachusetts, and has impregnated some with its
gross delusions, so that excommunication has been necessary, I am
determined to delay no longer in doing what I can to strip the mask from
this mother of sin, and to lay open this pit of abominations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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