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, {240} 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.