In conclusion we dedicate these pages to God, to His people and to all who love the right, trusting that their mission will not be without effect in the spread of His righteousness and the dissemination of His truth. G. R. SALT LAKE CITY, August 7th, 1883. CONTENTS. The History of the Manuscript The Originator of the "Spaulding Story" The Bogus Affidavit Mrs. Dickenson's Speculations What the Book of Mormon Really is Utter Disagreement of the Two Histories Joseph Smith's Early Life Joseph's Account of the Discovery of the Plates Time Occupied in Translating the Book of Mormon The Three Witnesses Oliver Cowdery David Whitmer Martin Harris Internal Evidences of the Book of Mormon The Prophecies of the Book of Mormon Appendix THE MYTH OF THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND. CHAPTER I. THE HISTORY OF THE MANUSCRIPT. Time and again, at recurring intervals of unequal length, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is assailed with a rehash of the notorious "Spaulding story," which from frequent repetition has become as familiar in the mouths of many of the Saints as household words. True, the story in its details is not always identical, it is altered, re-arranged, or "cooked" to suit the necessities of the story teller, but in its essential particulars it remains the same. Its burden is that a certain "reverend" gentleman of Conneaut, Ohio, named Solomon Spaulding, in the early part of the present century, wrote a historical romance which he entitled the "Manuscript Found," that in some unexplained and unexplainable way, but generally imagined to have been through Sidney Rigdon, the youthful Joseph Smith obtained access to this manuscript and from its scanty pages elaborated the Book of Mormon, which he afterwards palmed upon the world as a divine revelation. This is the substance of the "Spaulding story." It is a frantic effort to prove the Book of Mormon a forgery and a fraud, for it is very evident that if the Book of Mormon is not of God then the whole superstructure of "Mormonism" is of necessity a gross imposture, the cruelest of religious deception that for many centuries has misled humanity. All other theories advanced to prove this record false having long since failed, the "Spaulding story" is the last and only resort of those who oppose the divine mission of Joseph Smith, and though many a time refuted and proved an impossibility, yet, it is that or nothing; and the malignant hatred of the wicked not permitting the Book of Mormon to stand on its own intrinsic merits, or be judged by its own internal evidences, this story has to be again and again revamped as the last hope of a hopeless cause which perceives in the triumph of "Mormonism" the seal of its own destruction. To consider this story, its origination and history, its claims on the credulity of mankind, and the weight of evidence for and against it, will be topic of the following pages.