Rays of Living Light on the One Way of SalvationPenrose, Charles W. (Charles William)
Religion
Rays of Living Light on the One Way of Salvation
Penrose, Charles W. (Charles William)
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- Doctrines; Latter Day Saint churches -- Doctrines
united bearing testimony to an unbelieving world that Jesus of
Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the eternal God and the Savior of
the world.
This record also contains an account of a colony directed of the
Lord to the western continent at the time of the scattering of the
people from the land of Shinar and the confusion of tongues, at the
stoppage of the building of the Tower of Babel. The ruins of their
cities and temples and fortifications, discovered by travelers and
archaeologists since the publication of the Book of Mormon, are
silent but potent witnesses of the truth of the record. Each
succeeding year brings forth further evidences of this character,
that form a cloud of witnesses to the divine mission of the Prophet,
Seer, and Translator, Joseph Smith. The Book of Mormon has since
been published in many languages and submitted to the scrutiny of
the religious and scientific world, and no one as yet has been able
to point out wherein it disagrees with the Jewish Scriptures or with
the facts developed by antiquarian research and scientific
investigation. Yet it was brought forth in this age by an unlearned
youth, not acquainted with the world, reared in rural simplicity,
without access to the literature of the time, and without even the
ordinary acquirements of the schoolboy of the present.
According to the Book of Mormon, the people who journeyed from
Jerusalem to the American continent, taking with them the genealogy
of their fathers and writings of the law and the prophets, were of
the tribe of Joseph through Ephraim and Manasseh, and were led out
of Palestine when Zedekiah was king of Judah. In keeping the record,
which was subsequently abridged by the prophet Mormon, they used the
learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians. Their
hieroglyphs and symbols, however, were changed and modified, so that
the characters upon the plates revealed to Joseph Smith, where they
had lain hidden for about 1,400 years, was a "reformed Egyptian."
How this uneducated youth was able to bring forth a work of such
magnitude and importance, unless by inspiration of Almighty God, and
by the means explained remains a mystery to unbelievers. For a long
time it was pretended by enemies of the work that one Solomon
Spaulding wrote a Manuscript Story which in some unexplained manner
fell into the hands of Joseph Smith, who worked it over into the
Book of Mormon. But that foolish tale has signally failed of its
purpose, for in recent years the Spaulding manuscript has come to
light, and is now deposited in the Library of Oberlin College, Ohio,
and proves to be as unlike the Book of Mormon as Jack the Giant
Killer is dissimilar to the Bible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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