This school of critics--and its following is much larger than is generally admitted--in this arbitrary way gets rid of the miracles of both the Old and the New Testament. The resurrection of Jesus, to them, is but a figment of the over-wrought minds of his disciples; and has no better foundation than the dreams and light visions of women, foremost among whom is Mary of Magdala, [6] the once possessed. The glorious departure of Jesus from the midst of his disciples, on Mount Olivet--after the resurrection--is merely a collective hallucination, an illusion--"the air on these mountain tops is full of strange mirages!" [7] The display of God's power on the day of Pentecost as revealed in the Acts of the Apostles, is a thunderstorm. [8] The speaking in tongues by the apostles on the same occasion and thereafter in the Church, is but the ecstatic utterance of incoherent sounds mistaken for a foreign language; while prophecy is but the fruit of mental excitement, a sort of ecstatic frenzy. [9] With views such as these quite prevalent in Christendom, relative to miraculous events, it is but to be expected that the testimony of the Three Witnesses would be accounted for on some similar hypothesis. The early anti-Mormon writers generally assumed a conspiracy between Joseph Smith and the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, and hence accorded no importance [10] to the testimony of either group--the Three or the Eight. Later, however, the force of the testimony of the Witnesses persisting, and pressing for an explanation which the theory of conspiracy and collusion did not satisfy, there began to be advanced the theory that probably Joseph Smith had in some way deceived the Witnesses and thus brought them to give their testimony to the world. "Either these Witnesses were grossly deceived by a lying prophet," says Daniel P. Kidder, who wrote an unfriendly book against the Church in 1843, "or else they wickedly and wilfully perjured themselves, by swearing to what they knew to be false." "The former," he adds, "although not very creditable to their good sense, is yet the more charitable opinion, and is rendered probable by the fact, that hundreds have been deceived in the same way. It is confirmed, moreover, by the well-known mental phenomenon, that to individuals accustomed to disregard the laws of veracity, truth and falsehood are alike. They can as easily persuade themselves of the one as of the other." [11] Also the Rev. Henry Caswell, professor of divinity in Kemper College, Missouri, writing in 1843, said: He [Joseph Smith] then persuaded [Martin] Harris to believe, that in some sense he actually beheld the wonderful plates. There was a worthless fellow named Oliver Cowdery, residing in the neighborhood, a school teacher by profession, and also a Baptist preacher, who, together with one David Whitmer, was similarly persuaded by our ingenious Prophet. [12]