The same was the case with Joe Smith, an idle, shiftless lad, utterly incapable of conceiving, far less of executing the project of founding a new church. He was ignorant, illiterate, and weak, and of bad reputation. I knew his family, and even him also, in my boyhood, before he became a prophet. He was one of those persons in whose hand the divining-rod will operate, and he and others of his family spent much time in searching with the rod for watercourses, minerals, and hidden treasures. Every mesmerizer would at once have recognized him as an impressible subject. He also could throw himself, by artificial means, that of a peculiar kind of stone, which he called his Urim and Thummim, into the sleep-waking state, in which only would he or could he prophesy. In that state he seemed another man. Ordinarily his look was dull, and heavy, almost stupid; his eye had an inexpressive glare, and he was rough, and rather profane. But the moment he consulted his Urim and Thummim, and the spirit was upon him, his face brightened up, his eye shone and sparkled as living fire, and he seemed instinct with a life and energy not his own. He was in those times, as one of his apostles assured me, “awful to behold.” Much nonsense has been vented by the press about the origin of his Bible, or the Book of Mormon. The most ridiculous as well as the most current version of the affair is, that the book was originally written as a novel, by one Spalding, a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania, and that Joe got hold of the manuscript and published it as a new Bible. This version is refuted by a simple perusal of the book itself, which is too much and too little to have had such an origin. In his normal state, Joe Smith could never have written the more striking passages of the Book of Mormon; and any man capable of doing it, could never have written any thing so weak, silly, utterly unmeaning as the rest. No man ever dreamed of writing it as a novel, and whoever had produced it in his normal state, would have made it either better in its feebler parts, or worse in its stronger passages.