the children of men, according to the plainness which is in the Lamb of God; because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceeding great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them. [41] It is disputed, by some, that any such thing as here described has taken place with reference to the Bible, and labored arguments are made to prove that contention. [42] Into that contention it is not necessary to enter at length. It will be sufficient to show that there are many books referred to in the several books comprising the Old and New Testaments that are not to be found in that collection. Books that are spoken of as containing revelations; books written by prophets and apostles, and evidently as much entitled to a place in the canon of scriptures as those that are now there. What has become of them? Who is responsible for their absence? Pointing to the excellence of those books we have is no compensation for the absence of those we have not. So long as the books of scripture we hold in reverence, as containing the word of God, speak of other books and epistles that contained revelations from the Spirit of God that are not in the Bible, it is useless to contend that our collection of sacred books, called the Bible, contains the whole word of God. These absent books may, as Nephi declares they do, contain many precious and plain parts of God's truth, which would have preserved the Christian world from many of the doctrinal errors into which it has been plunged for want of knowledge. Again I ask, who is responsible for the absence of these books? Nephi declares that "a great and abominable church" is responsible for their absence, that that church took them away. I do not believe that Nephi here had reference to any one of the many divisions of Christendom. Nephi, in fact, recognized the existence of two churches only. One he styles, "the church of the Lamb of God;" and the other he bluntly calls "the church of the devil." [43] "And whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God, belongeth to that great church which is the mother of abominations; the whore of all the earth." [44] The church then that withheld from the world the part of the word of God, as developed in the teachings and writings of the apostles, was undoubtedly apostate Christendom; massed under the general title of the "great and abominable church," without reference to any of its divisions of sub-divisions; and that is the power that withheld and destroyed some parts of the scriptures. In proof of which I cite the following references to sacred books and writings both in the Old and New Testaments, which are not to be found in it. First, books of the Old Testament: