In including Mrs. Harris in this list, the Lord made one of the greatest mistakes into which he ever fell in using Joe as a mouthpiece. Mrs. Harris's Quaker belief had led her from the start to protest against the Bible scheme, and to warn her husband against the Smith family, and she vigorously opposed his investment of any money in the publication of the book. On the occasion of his first visit to Joe in Pennsylvania, according to Mother Smith, Mrs. Harris was determined to accompany him, and he had to depart without her knowledge; and when he went the second time, she did accompany him, and she ransacked the house to find the "record" (as the plates are often called in the Smiths' writings). When Harris returned home with the translated pages which Joe intrusted to him (in July, 1828), he showed them to his family and to others, who tried in vain to convince him that he was a dupe. Mrs. Harris decided on a more practical course. Getting possession of the papers, where Harris had deposited them for safe keeping, she refused to restore them to him. What eventually became of them is uncertain, one report being that she afterward burned them. This should have caused nothing more serious in the way of delay than the time required to retranslate these pages; for certainly a well-equipped Divinity, who was revealing a new Bible to mankind, and supplying so powerful a means of translation as the Urim and Thummim, could empower the translator to repeat the words first written. Indeed, the descriptions of the method of translation given afterward by Smith's confederates would seem to prove that there could have been but one version of any translation of the plates, no matter how many times repeated. Thus, Harris described the translating as follows:-- "By aid of the seer stone [no mention of the magic spectacles] sentences would appear and were read by the prophet and written by Martin, and, when finished, he would say 'written'; and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear, and another appear in its place; but if not written correctly, it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used."* * Elder Edward Stevenson in the Deseret News (quoted in Reynold's "Mystery of the Manuscript Fund," p. 91). David Whitmer, in an account of this process written in his later years, said:--