truth, by which power he is made to know the truth. These principles obtain in this last dispensation of the gospel. Joseph Smith comes as did Noah, Enoch, Moses, the Prophets, Christ and the Apostles--he comes with a message from God--with a new volume of scripture, whose express purpose is to enlarge the foundations of faith. He and his associates bear witness of its truth, and those who will give heed to that testimony, and will seek to God for further knowledge, are expressly promised in the Book of Mormon itself, that they shall receive a manifestation of its truth by the power of the Holy Ghost; "And by the power of the Holy Ghost," says this Nephite record, "ye may know the truth of all things." [25] Throughout, it will be seen that in this matter of the Book of Mormon, the divine power is acting in harmony with those great principles which have been operating in the spiritual economy of this world from the beginning; which fact, in reality, is at least an incidental testimony of the truth of the work. In the light of all these reflections, then, together with the fact that part of the Book of Mormon was sealed, the time not then having arrived for its translation, there is nothing remarkable in the circumstance of the Nephite plates being returned to the care of the angel-guardian of them. Certainly there is nothing unreasonable in such a procedure, and surely nothing in the circumstance that warrants the ridicule with which that statement has sometimes been received. Moreover, human guardianship of such things is by no means as secure as some may conceive it to be. Take, for example, the fate which befell the Egyptian papyrus from which the Prophet translated the Book of Abraham. It is an item of Church history that in 1835 the Saints in Kirtland purchased, of one Michael H. Chandler, some Egyptian mummies; in the sarcophagus they occupied certain rolls of papyrus were found, beautifully engraved with Egyptian characters. Upon examination, Joseph Smith found the papyrus to be the writings of Abraham and of Joseph, the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt. Portions of these records the Prophet translated into the English language, and the translation was published in the _Times and Seasons_, vol. III, and subsequently made part of the _Pearl of Great Price_. After the death of the Prophet the mummies, together with the records on papyrus, were left in charge of his mother, Lucy Smith. She afterwards parted with them, under what circumstances is not positively known. Finally, the records and mummies found their way into Wood's Museum, in Chicago, where, according to the statement of the editors of the Plano edition of _Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith and his Progenitors_, by Lucy Smith, they were destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. [26] Thus the writings of Abraham, after being preserved for many generations in the linen wrappings of Egyptian mummies, were consumed by fire in a modern city,