SOURCE: “The Seer Stone Controversy: Writing The Book of Mormon,” in Mosaic, Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 35-53.

[In the following essay, St. John Stott explains why—regardless of whether The Book of Mormon was a product of Smith's own imagination or not—it is perfectly understandable that Smith would claim that the words were indeed God's own.]

In June 1829 Joseph Smith, Jr. presented himself at the office of Richard Lansing (the clerk of the Northern District of New York) to register the title of the Book of Mormon and secure copyright for the work.¹ He did so as the book's “author and proprietor,” even though the title indicated that the book was written “by the hand of Mormon,” not Joseph Smith: but Lansing probably thought nothing of this contradiction—if indeed he ever noticed it. Smith, he would have presumed, was merely pretending that the book was Mormon's when in fact the work was all his own. For Smith, however, it was the claim to authorship and not the attribution to Mormon that was disingenuous (although necessary to secure copyright under American law). The Book of Mormon, he regularly maintained, was a translation. Its original was a history engraven on metal plates, “found in the township of Manchester, Ontario county, New York.”²

This translation was no ordinary one. The plates were engraved in a “reformed Egyptian” which, to judge from Smith's account, no scholar (indeed, not even the great Champollion) could have read or understood, for knowledge of it “was lost to the world.”³ But, Smith believed, he had been given the “gift to translate”—a gift of the Spirit to be counted with such New Testament gifts as prophecy and tongues⁴—and, no less remarkable, a seer stone, the “means” whereby he could exercise his gift.⁵ The Book of Mormon spoke of twin “interpreters” (presumably seer stones) and according to Smith, who claimed to have seen them “by the gift and power of God,” they were set in silver bows.⁶ Presumably because of this, rumor consistently had it that these means were an enormous pair of spectacles which Smith wore to translate; but there are no eye witness accounts of him using twin stones, or giant spectacles, and there is no good reason to think that Smith either had or used anything but a single, irregularly shaped stone, dark chocolate in color, and about the size of a hen's egg, which he had found when well-digging in 1822.⁷

At first Smith had used this stone simply to try to scry buried treasure and to attempt other feats of clairvoyance, but then, in 1828, he began to use it in order to “translate” the plates which by then he had announced that he had found. He would place the stone in the crown of his hat, bury his face in the hat to exclude the light, and launch forth into his translation.⁸ The result was a 594-page book which claims to be a religious history of ancestors of the American Indian, and which, in its origin at least, would seem to be absolutely unique.⁹

Smith's earliest followers, his associates during the months he was at work on the Book of Mormon, explained the translation as an act of “seeing.” David Whitmer, for example, who had observed some of the work of translation, claimed that as Smith gazed into the seer stone “a spiritual light would shine forth, and parchment would appear before [him], upon which was a line of characters from the plates, and under it, the translation in English.” Martin Harris, who had written at Smith's dictation, reported essentially the same. “By the aid of the seer stone sentences would appear and were read by the Prophet and were written by a [scribe] … and if correctly written that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place, but if not correctly written it remained until corrected. …” And according to Joseph Knight, Sr., a loyal friend and supporter of Smith (and one who had seen him at work), as Smith used the stone he would “take a sentence and it would appear in Brite Roman Letters then he would tell the writer and he would write it then that would go away then the next sentence would Come and so on.”¹⁰

Most of those who have written on the Book of Mormon have dismissed such accounts as incredible, though, one suspects, more in order to urge the superiority of their model of how revelation occurs or how the mind works, than out of any certainty that what Whitmer, Harris and Knight describe could not happen.¹¹ This will not do. Visual inspiration—however we explain it—is not impossible in itself. On certain occasions people do “see” the words that they say. There are, for example, reports of individuals speaking in tongues by reading words which they see with the mind's eye. “One woman,” Dennis and Rita Bennett write, “saw the words of her ‘tongue’, as if they had been written on the wall, complete with pronunciation and accent marks.”¹² The grounds for questioning (or rejecting) the idea that Smith enjoyed a visual inspiration for his translation, have, in short, to be based on something other than the idea that such inspiration is impossible.

There are such grounds, I hasten to add, for the way in which Smith explained how it was that he translated does make visual inspiration unlikely, if not impossible; but Whitmer and the others ignored what he said, and scholars have missed its significance. To some extent Smith contributed to this misunderstanding by his reluctance to give many details of the “coming forth” of the Book of Mormon: “it was not intended to tell the world all the particulars … [and] it was not expedient for him to relate this things,” he explained in October 1831.¹³ But, as we will see, though he did not give many details, he did give enough. Whitmer's problem (and that of Harris and Knight) was that he thought he could tell how Smith worked as a translator from what he knew of him as a scryer. Having believed in Smith as a scryer before he had followed him as a prophet,¹⁴ he found it impossible to overcome his preconception that the translation was an act of seeing—especially since Smith never seemed to refer to what he claimed were the plates. These (if in the room at all) he kept wrapped in a cloth on the table where he worked.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, this only fueled speculation, and reinforced the impression that Smith was still working as a seer. He was “not … permitted to see the ‘plates’,” Whitmer would explain, at least to his own satisfaction; but by way of compensation, “the ‘Characters’ would appear before him. …”¹⁶

This certainty that Smith saw his translation made it easy for misunderstandings to arise. Smith's claim in April 1829 that he had translated a parchment “written and hid up” by the Apostle John seems to have suggested to Whitmer, who became acquainted with him only at the end of May, that Smith saw parchment as he gazed into the stone, even when at work on the Book of Mormon.¹⁷ And it is possible that the Book of Mormon prophecy that a seer stone prepared for Smith would shine in darkness, together with Smith's own claim that he had “sight and power” to translate, filled out Whitmer's mental picture of what Smith was about.¹⁸ Meanwhile, perhaps unaware of the ideas held by his friends, Smith kept his counsel as to how he had worked—except to say rather uninformatively that it was by “the gift and power of God.”¹⁹

At least twice, however (and one suspects much more often), Smith identified his gift to translate with what he called the spirit of revelation. In April 1829 he promised Oliver Cowdery, one of his scribes, that he too would be able to translate “engravings of old records” by that spirit. And sometime before 1833 he told his friend Orson Pratt that it was by the spirit of revelation that he had himself translated the plates.²⁰ From what he said then, and on other occasions when he talked about the spirit of revelation, it is clear that it touched the mind and the heart but not the eye. Although he gave his most detailed account in 1839—a year after Whitmer and Harris had left the church, and possibly as many as six years after Knight had written the personal memorandum in which he described Smith's method of working—there was sufficient information in his counsel to Cowdery, given ten years before, to make his meaning clear.

To pursue this question might seem pointless in view of the well-known difficulties in seeing the Book of Mormon as a translation. As Michael D. Coe has noted, “Nothing, absolutely nothing, has ever shown up in any New World excavation which could suggest to a dispassionate observer that the Book of Mormon … [was] a historical document relating to the history of early migrations to the western hemisphere.”²¹ Further the testimony of eight of Smith's followers that together they saw and handled the plates has had to stand alone. No one else saw the plates at the time (although three other men testified that they had been shown the plates by an angel, they acknowledged that their experience had only been visionary)—and no one has seen them since.²² Most non-Mormons have thought that a single testimony is insufficient evidence for the existence of the plates, and have easily moved from doubt to cynicism about them. It has seemed obvious to those outside the circle of faith that the Book of Mormon was no translation simply because there were no plates, and therefore there was nothing that Smith could have translated.

All of this may be true; indeed, no doubt it is. But we can hardly leave the matter there. There need not really have been any plates for Smith to think that he could “translate” the words of Mormon. After all, he never actually had in his hands the parchment of John which he claimed to have translated,²³ and it is not impossible that (to Smith's mind) the Book of Mormon was a “translation” of the same kind as that of the parchment: a recovery of the meaning of writings which he had never had in his possession, but which he had seen in a vision, or a dream, or even through the stone.²⁴ Significantly, he would tell the “three witnesses” that when they saw the plates, it would be as he had seen them—by the power of God, through faith.²⁵ Or again: it does not matter for our purposes whether or not the book was a translation. To say that Smith could not translate is not to say that he did not think that he could. Whatever the nature of his gift, he would not have deduced his inspiration from the correctness of his translation; he would instead have trusted that his words were a translation because they came to him by what he thought was the inspiration of God. Such arguments presume, of course, that Smith was sincere in his claim to inspiration, and that the Book of Mormon was something other than the fruit of “conscious artifice” on his part.²⁶ Needless to say, that can hardly be proved—but, as it will be seen, there are good reasons why it probably should be accepted.

Smith gave his fullest account of what he meant by the spirit of revelation on June 27, 1839, in Commerce (renamed by the Mormons, Nauvoo), Illinois. According to notes taken by John Taylor, one of the apostles of Smith's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and copied in 1840 by fellow-apostle Willard Richards, Smith took up the subject after discussing the visions of “Isaiah, Ezekiel, John upon the Isle of Patmos, St Paul in the third heavens, & all the Saints who held communion with the general Assembly & Church of the First Born &c.”

The Spirit of Revelation [Smith continued] is in connection with these blessings. A person may profit by noticing the first intimations of the Spirit of Revelation for instance when you feel pure Inteligence flowing unto you it may give you sudden strokes of ideas that by noticeting it you may find it. fulfilled the same day or Soon. (I.E.) those things that were presented unto your minds by the Spirit of God will come to pass and thus by learning the Spirit of God. & understanding it you may grow into the principle of Revelation. Until you become perfect in Christ Jesus.²⁷

As an account of Smith's thoughts on the spirit of revelation this is clearly incomplete since the prophet evidently had other instances of its “first intimations” in mind. Perhaps he discussed them, but Taylor did not note them (or Richards did not copy them); or perhaps Smith contented himself with a single example, thinking that he would discuss other aspects of this mode of revelation another day. Whatever the case, he clearly had more to say.

Nevertheless the Taylor/Richards notes are sufficiently detailed for our purpose. Smith was talking at the time of the importance of personal revelation as a sign of election, an important idea for him. Taking the biblical affirmation that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” to mean that Jesus testified to a person's salvation by giving him the spirit of revelation, Smith believed that revelation would come to every faithful Latter Day Saint.²⁸ He would later conclude that a sacramental “sealing” was also needed if salvation were to be guaranteed, but this did not affect his feeling that personal revelation was necessary. “Any man that does not receive revelation for himself is damned,” he bluntly asserted in 1843.²⁹ When, therefore, Smith discussed how an individual could recognize revelation when it came, he would almost certainly have chosen for his example—or his chief example, if these notes are selective—what he thought to be the most usual manifestation of the spirit of revelation.

When the word of God came by the spirit of revelation, Smith noted, it came not as a vision but as “sudden strokes of ideas”—ideas which irrupted into the mind without any apparent connection with what had gone before. At the same time there was a feeling of “pure Inteligence flowing into you”—a sensible witness from the Holy Ghost (Smith had already explained that “the Holy Ghost has no other effect than pure inteligence”)³⁰ that the sudden strokes of ideas were indeed of God.

Smith had long accepted Paul's idea that those who heard preaching and prophecy could distinguish between divine inspiration and what was satanic or simply uninspired by the witness of the Holy Ghost.³¹ Here, as he had done in the past, he took this argument a step further. Those blessed with revelation had to feel the Spirit coming into them to know that their ideas could be trusted; if they did not feel the Spirit, either there was no revelation, or they were spiritually dead. (God “hath spoken to you in a still, small voice,” Laman and Lemuel are told in the Book of Mormon, “but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words.”)³² Smith had sometimes gone as far as to specify that the feeling in question was peace, or joy, or a burning in the bosom,³³ but these explanations were directed at specific individuals, not at the church or the body of his followers as a whole. When he spoke in more general terms, Smith was more cautious, recognizing that the Spirit varied in its operations from individual to individual.³⁴ On this occasion, therefore, instead of offering a description of what he meant by the feeling of “pure Inteligence”—something which could well have been confusing, even Procrustean, rather than helpful—he offered a test. He urged his followers to pay special attention to their intuitions: their sudden ideas as to what would “come to pass.” If their predictions were accurate, their inspiration could be trusted, and all that they had to do was to remember how they felt at such moments of intuition, or pay attention to their feelings when the experience was repeated. By doing this they could know how the Holy Ghost ministered to them, and what to expect of future, possibly more substantive revelation.

Smith was less helpful to those curious as to what he meant by “sudden strokes of ideas,” leaving it unstated whether the ideas would come already formulated as inner speech, or instead as pre-verbal thoughts which needed to be put into words. We can, however, be certain on other grounds that Smith did not have to search for ways adequately to express his ideas when working by revelation. At other times, to be sure, he could be at a loss for words. John Taylor tells rather plaintively of the difficulty he and Smith had in putting in order their thoughts on the last days,³⁵ and no doubt Smith found nothing unusual in the experience. But reports of his dictation when inspired stress his unhesitant manner and how few were the corrections he made (the opposite of what we would expect of a man casting around for just the right words).³⁶ And when such reports are taken with Book of Mormon accounts of “the word of the Lord coming [into] the mind”; the voice of the Lord “speaking … in very word,” or coming as a whisper; or even revelation being “whatsoever things should come into [the] heart,”³⁷ it seems clear that Smith usually experienced revelation as inner speech—not as glimmerings of insight yet to be defined.

This is not to insist that in Smith's experience the sudden strokes of ideas did not need syntactic elaboration. As Lev S. Vygotsky has noted, inner speech is often abbreviated and condensed, and requires expansion when vocalized.³⁸ In ordinary speech, however, this expansion is spontaneous, and there is no reason to think that Smith did not consider revelation received and revelation expressed as one and the same.

On other occasions Smith talked of dramatic modes of revelation, but clearly there is no sense of drama here. But for their suddenness and the witness of the Spirit (itself something as likely to be “calm & serene” as anything),³⁹ there was nothing about the ideas of revelation which could distinguish them from ordinary thought. They did not even transcend the understanding of the individual involved. God spoke to his servants “in their weakness, after the manner of their language,” Smith had explained in 1831, and no more than six weeks after his discussion of the spirit of revelation, he made the point again: God adapts himself to the “Language & capacity” of those to whom he speaks.⁴⁰ Further, since revelation was according to “language” or understanding,⁴¹ study was an indispensable preliminary to any revelation which transcended the quotidian. Only “time and experience and carful and solom though[ts],” Smith had written three months before, could lead to a person discovering “how much more dignifide and noble are the thoughts of God than the vain imaginations of the human heart.”⁴² Hence the importance of, as Smith put it on June 27, the Holy Ghost “enlightening the understanding & storeing the intellect with present knowledge.”⁴³ The process he had in mind should be clear. Out of the understanding, by the agency of the spirit of revelation, came the word of God—stirring, exciting, perhaps even disturbing with its new insights, but framing them by drawing upon what had been read, discussed or thought before.

Although none of Smith's 1839 remarks on the spirit of revelation were made with a view to explaining his translation of the Book of Mormon, they are nevertheless very relevant to any discussion of that work. The understanding of revelation Smith outlined in Commerce underlay and gave coherence to the two explanations of the gift to translate which he had given in New York a decade before.

The better known of these two explanations formed part of an oracle to Cowdery accounting for his failure as a translator. Promised that he too had the gift to translate, Cowdery had waited for inspiration to come but, to his despair, after a few ideas had flickered into life and then died away there had been nothing. “Behold, you have not understood,” he was told; “you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought, save it was to ask me; but, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right. …”⁴⁴

It has often been presumed that because Cowdery was rebuked for not doing anything except wait for the translation to be given, the text of the Book of Mormon was never “given” under any circumstances—and that the process of revelation that was known to Smith was the sequence of study, hypothesis and prayer for confirmation that was recommended to his scribe.⁴⁵ But this is extremely unlikely. Cowdery was a not unintelligent man, and he would not have passively waited for revelation to come if Smith had not given the impression that that was all that was necessary. Had Smith “studied out” each line of his translation Cowdery would surely have noted and attempted to follow suit; and, for that matter, others who had watched Smith at work would have mentioned his habit of working line by line (or by any block that we can imagine) and testing his translation with prayer. But none of the reminiscences we have of Smith at work give us any reason to doubt that his words were spontaneously arrived at (i.e., “given”), and, rather than seeing him test his ideas by revelation we see him test his revelation against his own ideas, and those of others—stopping after dictating a reference to the walls of Jerusalem to wonder if Jerusalem did indeed have walls.⁴⁶ Besides, as we have seen, Smith would talk of revelation as something given (as in his reference to “sudden strokes of ideas”), not as something laboriously studied out, and there is no reason to think that he experienced translation-by-revelation any differently from revelation tout court. Relevant here are his remarks to a public meeting in Washington, D.C., in February 1840. The Book of Mormon, he explained then, “was communicated to him, direct from heaven. If there was such a thing on earth as the author of it, then he (Smith) was the author; but the idea that he wished to impress was, that he had penned it as dictated by God.”⁴⁷ To have written (more precisely: to have dictated) what came into his mind as if it were by dictation, is not to have worked by study, hypothesis and prayer.

But if studying out were not part of the process of translation itself, why was it necessary? Why was Cowdery faulted for not studying before attempting to translate? In the light of Smith's later reflections, the answer is clear. Study was as necessary as a preliminary to revelation-as-translation as it was to revelation when there was nothing to translate. The mind still needed to be “stored with … knowledge” before it could be quickened, and revelation could come.

As it had happened, Smith had thought long and hard about what was to be the subject of the Book of Mormon even before claiming to have found the plates. As early as 1823 he had entertained his family with his ideas on “the ancient inhabitants of the American continent”—“their dress, mode of travelling, and the animals upon which they rode, their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship.”⁴⁸ His mother had thought this remarkable because of her son's limited education, but it is really no more than what we would expect of a youth “much … given to meditation and deep study,” and blessed with a vivid imagination.⁴⁹ By the time that it was necessary to translate, his mind was primed, and revelation came.⁵⁰

Cowdery was not so fortunate. He had known Smith for less than a month when allowed to translate, and had learned of the Book of Mormon only a few months before his first meeting with the prophet.⁵¹ Possessing none of Smith's familiarity with the world of the Book of Mormon, when he was put to the test his inspiration inevitably failed. Asked to spin gold, he found himself without even straw.

Smith's other account of the gift to translate—chronologically his first—was part of the oracle to Cowdery which had promised the scribe that he too could be a translator. (Either Smith had forgotten when he made this promise how little Cowdery knew about the culture and cultus of the Book of Mormon peoples, or he had not yet realized how indispensable such knowledge was.) You shall receive knowledge “by the manifestation of my Spirit,” Cowdery was told: “yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you, and which shall dwell in your heart. Now behold, this is the spirit of revelation. …”⁵²

Two points need to be made about this promise. First, the spirit of revelation (and consequently the power to translate) was identified with the Holy Ghost. This seems to have been Smith's usual practice at the time, for we can see the same attribution of the translation to the Holy Ghost in a June 18, 1830 letter of the Rev. Dietrich Willers. Detailing what he had learned of the Book of Mormon and the Mormon church in the year after Smith had completed his translation in Willers' neighborhood, the minister reported unambiguously that (according to the Mormons) “the Holy Ghost would reveal [to Smith] the translation in the English language.”⁵³

At first glance this seems to conflict with what Smith taught in 1839. Then, on the basis of a somewhat idiosyncratic reading of John 14, Smith tried to distinguish between the spirit of revelation and the Holy Ghost. There were two agents involved in revelation, he explained: “the Comforter” (or the Holy Ghost), and “another Comforter” (Christ himself). Christ spoke—either in person or by the spirit of revelation—and the Holy Ghost testified to the inspiration of his words.⁵⁴ Smith did not, however, hold to this distinction with any consistency; indeed, even before he had finished his explanation he was once more attributing revelation to a single agent, “the spirit of God.” There is, therefore, no reason to presume any significant difference in his thinking over a decade, or that his 1839 teaching on the two Comforters had been more than a tentative reification of two aspects of the ministry of the Holy Ghost.

Second, the oracle promises that the Holy Ghost will speak both to the mind and to the heart. To see the importance of this it will be helpful to consider a passage in the Book of Mormon that was dictated not much more than a month after Cowdery was promised the power to translate. “When a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost,” Nephi reflects, “the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men.”⁵⁵ We have here Smith's understanding of the advantage of speaking to people rather than writing to them.⁵⁶ One can write under inspiration and yet the words can have no force; but when one speaks by inspiration the power of the Holy Ghost can be felt by one's hearers, and they can know that one's preaching or prophecy is of God. In the oracle to Cowdery, this view of the relationship between prophet and people is applied to that between God and prophet/translator. God is to be the speaker and Cowdery his hearer, and God's words (the “dictation” that Smith himself enjoyed as he translated) are to have a self-authenticating power because the Holy Ghost—by which he will speak—will touch Cowdery's heart as well as his mind. (Smith had already alerted Cowdery to this significance of the felt testimony of the Holy Ghost, and he would refer to it again in an oracle for his brother, Hyrum Smith, in May.)⁵⁷ What Cowdery was promised, in short, was what Smith taught his followers to expect ten years later: propositional revelation with its own built-in guarantee.

Mormon authors have usually tried not to see the Book of Mormon as propositional revelation in order not to have to attribute its faulty grammar to God. As a result they have been happy to point to the title page's disclaimer “if there are faults, they are the mistakes of men,” and to Smith's willingness to revise his translation for its second and third editions (1837, 1840). This willingness, they have argued, shows that though Smith thought that the ideas of the Book of Mormon were inspired, he saw nothing sacred in the words used to express them.⁵⁸ Such an argument is no more than wishful thinking. Smith had no qualms about changing the text of his revelations, including that of the Book of Mormon, when he considered that his second thoughts were themselves revelation, clarifying what had come before, or bringing new insight under changed circumstances, or even supplying the truth when previously there had been error.⁵⁹ But when he sensed no inspiration to change his text, when he did not find error or inadequacy, he did regard it as sacred, and he protested any attempt to change what he had written. When Cowdery urged him to change a passage in one of his revelations, Smith demanded to know “by what right he took upon him … to alter or erase, to add to or diminish from, a revelation or commandment from Almighty God.”⁶⁰ When suggestions were made that he correct part of the Book of Mormon text while it was at the printers, he similarly refused.⁶¹

At no point, it will have been noticed, does the model of revelation just outlined require the use of a seer stone or any other mechanical aid. And yet, as we have seen, Smith used one when working on the Book of Mormon and always insisted that it had been essential that he did. And according to Harris, it was only with one particular stone that he could work. When Harris substituted for the prophet's seer stone a pebble “very much resembling [it],” Smith (according to Harris' account) found it impossible to continue until Harris gave him back the original.⁶²

Harris' story is perhaps a little too good to be true—a little too tailor-made to answer those who accused Smith of merely dictating each day what he had memorized the night before—for us to trust it entirely. In any case, if such an incident did occur it is more probable that Smith had been put on his guard by a difference in Harris' manner rather than any difference in the stone. Nevertheless, it is clear that Smith did at first rely upon the stone for his revelations and he might well have doubted his ability to continue with his translation if he had suspected that a substitution had been made.

Smith's use of the stone to translate followed from his use of it to scry. Staring into it had not only produced visions (a fairly predictable consequence); it had taught him to value, as he never had before, intuitions which came to him with a force which he was sure was inspired. It had been by using the stone, Smith told Orson Pratt, that he became “well acquainted with the Spirit of Revelation and Prophecy.”⁶³ In time, of course, as Pratt would boast, Smith became “so thoroughly endowed with the inspiration of the Almighty and the spirit of revelation that he often received [revelations] without any instrument or other means than the operation of the spirit upon his mind.”⁶⁴ This was not because he had put such things as seer stones behind him. In 1832 he would interpret Peter's new name of Cephas (John 1:42) as meaning “a seer, or a stone”; in 1838 he would still be using a seer stone as a scryer, hoping to find “a grate treasure in the earth”; and five years later, not long after once more using a seer stone to translate, he would teach that a white stone such as was mentioned in Revelation 2:17 would be given to all who inherited the new and glorified earth—and it would be a seer stone “wherby all things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms even all kingdoms will be made known.”⁶⁵ Smith would never have made seer stones this important in the economy of heaven—taking the theological commonplace that in the next life the elect would know more about God's work than they did in mortality, and insisting that even in the celestial kingdom of God it would be through a seer stone that revelation came⁶⁶—had he dismissed his use of seer stones as something to be forgotten. However, using a stone was inconvenient, tiring, and sometimes strained his eyes;⁶⁷ it is not surprising that when he realized that revelation would sometimes come to him whether he used the stone or not, he would no longer see a seer stone as a sine qua non for inspiration.

Before Smith made this discovery, or had the faith to act on it, he would have thought the stone to be as essential as Harris' story suggests that it was. Probably he would have thought that it possessed magic powers. Doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the most widely known evidence for Smith's belief in folk magic, an 1830 letter supposedly from Harris to W. W. Phelps (a Canandaigua, New York newspaper editor). In this letter Harris reports that Smith had told him in 1827 that when he first tried to find the “gold bible” (the Book of Mormon plates) an “old spirit … transfigured himself from a white salamander in the bottom of the whole and struck me 3 times & held the treasure & would not let me have it because I lay it down to cover the hole when the spirit says do not lay it down.”⁶⁸ As I write, police investigations of a series of bombings in Salt Lake City have raised the suspicion that this letter and other documents sold to the Mormon church in recent years were forged;⁶⁹ and even without the promise of forensic evidence yet to come there are reasons to question its authenticity. For example, as Jerald Tanner has pointed out, it is extremely unlikely that Harris would have written such a letter, with no attempt to give a religious gloss to the events described, when for three years he had been telling enquirers that it was an angel of God that had led Smith to find the “gold bible.”⁷⁰ To doubt the authenticity of the “salamander letter” is not, however, to doubt that Smith's mind ran—and ran deeply—in occult channels. He believed that God inspired the working of divining rods;⁷¹ he believed that through the seer stone he could discover “ghosts, infernal spirits, mountains of gold and silver”;⁷² and whether or not he believed in salamander spirits, he did believe that buried treasures had their guardians, and he seems to have thought it credible that they should appear as toads. When he first found the plates, his father told a neighbor in 1827, they were taken from him when he disobeyed instructions not to set them down. When he attempted to take them again, a spirit (who appeared as a toad before it “assumed the appearance of a man”) struck him; and when Smith made a third attempt to get the plates, the spirit “struck him again, and knocked him three or four rods and hurt him prodigiously.”⁷³

Smith was certainly the source for this story: his mother retells it in her family history, with the spirit Christianized as an angel (which itself suggests that what Joseph, Sr. told was not his own invention);⁷⁴ and in the account of his life which Smith dictated in 1832 there is what is recognizably the same incident.⁷⁵ There are, it must be allowed, major differences between the two accounts. For example, in that of 1832 there is no mention of Smith finding the plates, only to lose them. As Smith tells the story then, when he looked for the plates he could not find them; “exceedingly frightened,” he had begun to suspect that the vision which had sent him out to search had been no more than a dream when an angel assured him that the vision had been true, but because he had coveted the treasure he had hoped to find he had foredoomed his failure. Not too much should be made of these differences, however, for both accounts follow the same pattern, and presumably come from the same source. Smith (1) failed to obtain the plates because (2) he had violated a taboo (the catch-22 of treasure lore is that those who search for treasure must not covet it)⁷⁶ which (3) had been given him by a spirit.

Of the two accounts, that of 1832 is clearly preferable. Its reference to an angel is anachronistic, of course: though Smith might well have been searching for gold plates in 1823 (brass plates had been found two years before by men digging the Erie canal, and there were rumors of a gold Bible found in Canada),⁷⁷ as late as 1826 he had no idea why God had given him the gift of seeing.⁷⁸ But the fear that he had been deceived, a detail which Smith would hardly have gratuitously invented (significantly, in later accounts it is suppressed), marks this account as essentially honest to the facts. Smith, we can be sure, did not find the plates which he set out to discover. The tale that he told his parents was an attempt to make the failure seem less absolute. He had found the plates, but their guardian spirit had prevented his bringing them home. … He was a younger man then, and failure would have seemed more serious and the breaking of the tenth commandment harder to admit to.⁷⁹

Smith's confidence that his parents would believe such a tale tells us a lot about them, but it tells us more about him. For them to believe him, he had to be the sort of person who could see guardian spirits in toads (or white salamanders, for that matter)—the sort of person, in short, whose life was ordered by the rules of magic as well as the Christian gospel.⁸⁰ It is highly likely, therefore, to return to the translation of the Book of Mormon, that Smith did think that his stone had magic powers. We know that for years he carried the stone with him as a talisman that would protect him from attack;⁸¹ a similar and quite common superstition would have strengthened his conviction, when he was new to the work, that he could not translate without it.⁸²

To some extent this conviction was justified. Although his feelings that the stone was indispensable seem to have faded during the eighteen months that he worked on the Book of Mormon (there is somewhere a reminiscence that at the end he sometimes worked unaided),⁸³ it was not until after the translation was finished that he announced that he could and would “depend upon the Holy Ghost” rather than the stone “to be guided into truth and obtain the will of the Lord.”⁸⁴ The expectations of his followers had perhaps influenced his timing of this announcement, since for them the stone was so bound up with the translation that it would seem unthinkable that Smith would put it to one side; but there were in any case reasons why Smith needed the stone to translate, but did not need it to give oracles and bring revelation to the church (all that he foresaw doing at the time).

Smith's oracles and revelations were usually triggered either by questions of doctrine or by the need to know God's will for a certain person or in a particular situation. Either Smith would take these questions to the Lord and wait upon him for an answer, or he would find himself presented with answers to the problems which had preoccupied him to the point that revelation had come unsought. At times, however, the trigger would be his meditations on passages of scripture, and there is clearly little distinction to be made between this kind of revelation and the translations made by Smith which were merely revisions of, and elaborations of, a preestablished text—most of his “new translation of the Bible” of 1830-33, some of the “Book of Abraham” (1842), and those parts of the Book of Mormon where he worked with a Bible open before him. (Smith has the resurrected Christ give the Sermon on the Mount in America, and incorporates into his text scriptures which he believed Mormon's people would have known: some sixteen chapters of Isaiah, and Malachi 3 and 4.) But the bulk of the Book of Mormon and significant passages in his other translations were obviously not arrived at in this way. They were not derived from other texts (the Book of Mormon, for example, had to declare its narrative independence from Old World scripture since it was an American history); and they were not answers to doctrinal questions. If, as Alexander Campbell claimed, the Book of Mormon contains “every error and almost every truth in New York for the last ten years” (he was writing in 1831),⁸⁵ this was a by-product of the book's narrative, and not its starting point. The Book of Mormon might have seemed to Smith a confirmation and clarification of the Bible,⁸⁶ but it was written as a history, not a theological text. If Smith were asking questions, they would have been questions of narrative: “what happens next?” expressed a hundred different ways.

Such questions can be answered only by a surrender to the inner logic of one's inspiration—a giving way to the flow of ideas. Smith did this by using the stone. “Staring for some time at a shiny surface,” W. N. Schors has observed, “[induces] a loss of conscious and voluntary activity,”⁸⁷ and gazing into a seer stone would have had the same effect. Into the stillness, as Smith waited, inspiration would come.

Some, like Poe, have discovered that at this stage of withdrawal from conscious thought their minds threw up hypnagogic images which were beyond words. Smith found more substantial inspiration: moments of clairvoyance which let him (he believed) reach out in space and time; and, when he emptied his mind, words which he thought were the word of God. It is to Hawthorne rather than Poe that we must go for a parallel (partial though it is); the Hawthorne who would write in 1834 of waking at midnight, “when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength: when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them.”⁸⁸ Smith worked by day, but with his seer stone buried in his hat he created his own midnight. Using the seer stone made it possible for him to ignore the distractions of his environment, still his thoughts, and let the translation that he had unconsciously studied out break into his mind. He could not, one might venture, have easily dispensed with the stone while working on the Book of Mormon, even had there been no other constraints.

Confirmation that Smith needed to use the stone to “translate” comes from his using it early in 1842 to complete his work on the “Book of Abraham.” He had begun this translation from the Egyptian seven years before by intuiting the meaning of one of the vignettes in a set of papyri he had bought, and then elaborating on the text of Genesis 11 and 12.⁸⁹ The result had been a dramatic narrative of Abraham's migration from Chaldea to Egypt which had impressed Smith's followers;⁹⁰ but by the time that Abraham had reached the plain of Moreh, Smith seems to have run out of ideas. Without even bringing Abraham before Pharaoh (something suggested by another of the vignettes as well as Gen. 12:16-19) he put the translation to one side and turned to other projects, and when he returned to it in 1842 he decided, after dictating only a few verses, to use the seer stone rather than to continue correcting a pretranslated text. He did not need to do this, it should be noted, in order to meet the expectations of others, or because he was uncertain how God spoke or whether he would continue to speak if the stone were not used. By then Smith knew well enough what the spirit of revelation was like, and his followers had been quite untroubled by twelve years of revelations for which Smith had usually used no mechanical aid. Instead, he chose to use the stone for chapters 3-5 of the “Book of Abraham” because he needed to tap an inspiration which a study of the pages of Genesis did not yield. Presumably the result was all that he had hoped for: a wide-ranging discussion of cosmology and the plan of salvation which crystallized (confirmed, he would have said) much of his thinking on these subjects in recent years.⁹¹ And presumably he had had this hope because there had been a similar crystallization when he had used the stone for the Book of Mormon.

At this point we need to return to the question of sincerity. Whatever our reaction to Smith's claims to inspiration—claims which, as noted, must be taken separately from his claims to have been a translator, or to have handled and hefted plates of gold—it seems cynical to the point of naivety to insist that they were fraudulent. But for its insistence on the witness of the Spirit, the account Smith gave of the way he worked by revelation is unexceptionable. It describes a process that is treated in any account of creativity, and received its classic formulation from Bertrand Russell when he explained how he wrote.

After first contemplating a book on some subject and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconcious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking. Sometimes I would find, after a time, that I had made a mistake, and that I could not write the book I had in mind. But often I was more fortunate. Having by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconscious, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation.⁹²

Smith differs from this only by attributing his words to the operation of God's spirit rather than the subconscious mind, and by insisting that the Spirit's sensible witness proved that those words really were of God.

Whether this witness was no more than Russell's moment of “blinding clarity” or indeed an operation of the Spirit of the Lord is a matter of faith not history, and not something that can be treated here. But if we assume that there was something distinctive about the ideas Smith thought to be revelation (and Russell's testimony suggests that it is not an unreasonable assumption to make), then—given that Smith had no awareness of the subtleties of the subconscious mind, and given also his willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom that God no longer spoke to man⁹³—there was nothing unreasonable in his thinking that his intuitions were the word of God. Some theologians of his day allowed for no more than God's superintendency in revelation; that is, for his preventing error as the biblical author worked according to his best understanding. Others talked of revelation as a process of elevation, in which God heightened the natural powers of expression of prophet, historian, or poet. But others, such as Nathaniel Emmons, one of the most influential of the “New Divinity” theologians, argued for revelation by suggestion: God's directly causing the words of scripture to pass through its author's mind. Revelation came, they explained, as thoughts which were indistinguishable as thoughts from any others, but which were validated by the accompanying witness of the Holy Ghost.⁹⁴ If Smith were aware of this school of thought—which he might well have been, since his mother, his brothers Hyrum and Samuel Harrison, and his sister Sophronia were members of the Western Presbyterian Church in Palmyra⁹⁵—he could hardly help claiming the status of revelation for the thoughts which broke into his mind, or affirm that it was by the gift and power of God that he could translate.

Notes

1. The key primary texts and abbreviations used in this essay are as follows: BM: Joseph Smith, Jr., The Book of Mormon (Palmyra, 1830); BC: A Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Christ (Zion [Independence], 1833); DC: Doctrine and Convenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God (Kirtland, 1835); PW: The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee (Salt Lake City, 1984); WJ: The Words of Joseph: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of Joseph Smith, ed. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook (Provo, 1980). All quotations from the works of Joseph Smith retain his idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

2. BM, [ii], title page, p. 4.

3. BM, p. 538; Times and Seasons, November 1843, 373.

4. BC, 4:2; cf. 1:5; 2:5; 9:1-2; BM, pp. 150, 247.

5. BC, 24:7.

6. BM, p. 172; DC, 42:1-2; PW, p. 203. From the early 1830s, following the example of his followers, Smith referred to seer stones as “Urim and Thummim”: see Kenneth Sommers, Jr., “The Mystery and History of the Urim and Thummim,” Restoration Studies, 2 (1983), 75-79.

7. Richard Van Waggoner and Steve Walker, “Joseph Smith: ‘The Gift of Seeing’,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 15 (1982), 52-59.

8. Van Waggoner and Walker bring together the various accounts of the stone's use, as do James E. Lancaster, “The Method of Translation of the Book of Mormon,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, 3 (1983), 52-57; and Stephen D. Ricks, “Joseph Smith's Means and Methods of Translating the Book of Mormon,” Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies Preliminary Report, 1984.

9. For a serious attempt to fit the Book of Mormon to this background, see John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, 1985); except in the use of a seer stone, The Book of Mormon is typical of “channeled texts”: see John Koffend, “The Gospel According to Helen,” Psychology Today, September 1980, 90.

10. Saints Herald, 15 November 1879, 341; David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, Mo., 1887), p. 12; Edward Stevenson, “One of the Three Witnesses,” Deseret News, 30 November 1881; Jessee, “Joseph Knight's Recollections of Early Mormon History,” Brigham Young University Studies, 17 (1976), 35; see also Van Waggoner and Walker, 50-52.

11. B. H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God (Salt Lake City, 1909), 2:121, argues for a distinction between inspiration and expression—cf. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York, 1980), p. 56. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, 1984), who works in Roberts' tradition of Mormon history, ignores the accounts completely (p. 97). Richard P. Howard, Restoration Scriptures: A Study of their Textual Development (Independence, 1969), p. 40, comes to a similar conclusion to Roberts—but cf. the influence of William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London, 1934), pp. 332, 216, on pp. 12-23, and on Howard's “Latter Day Saint Scriptures and the Doctrine of Propositional Revelation,” Courage: A Journal of History, Thought and Action, 1 (1970), 209-25. Klaus J. Hansen ignores the Whitmer/Harris/Knight account and argues for auditory inspiration, taking his cue from Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1978): Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago, 1981), pp. 16-20. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (New York, 1945), p. 61, mentions Whitmer's account with gentle mockery; for the biases with which she approached Smith, see Marvin S. Hill, “Secular or Sectarian History? A Critique of No Man Knows My History,” Church History, 43 (March 1974), 78-96.

12. Dennis and Rita Bennett, The Holy Spirit and You, 2nd ed. (London, 1974), p. 79.

13. See Donald Q. Cannon and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., Far West Record: Minutes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1844 (Salt Lake City, 1983), p. 23.

14. Kansas City Daily Journal, 5 June 1881; Tiffany's Monthly, June 1859, p. 164; Larry Porter, “The Joseph Knight Family,” The Ensign, October 1978, 39-40.

15. Saints Herald, 1 October 1879, 289-90.

16. M. J. Hubble interview with Whitmer, 13 November 1886, in Stanley B. Kimball, “Missouri Mormon Manuscripts: Sources in Selected Societies,” Brigham Young University Studies, 14 (1974), 485.

17. BC, ch. 6.

18. BM, p. 328; BC, 2:5.

19. PW, pp. 77, 215.

20. BC, 7:1; Minutes of the School of Prophets, Salt Lake City, 14 January 1871, in Robert J. Matthews, “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible—A History and a Commentary (Provo, 1975), p. 40.

21. Michael D. Coe, “Mormon Archaeology: An Outsider View,” Dialogue, 8 (1973), 46.

22. BM, [p. 590]; Hill, 92-93; Brodie, pp. 76-80.

23. The parchment was “hid up” (BC, 6:1) and Smith learned of its contents through the seer stone; see Roberts, ed., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, 1932-51), Period 1, 1:35-36.

24. There are reports of his using the seer stone to find the plates (see Van Waggoner and Walker, “Gift of Seeing,” pp. 56-57); possibly Smith never went beyond the initial vision.

25. DC, 42:1-2. I hope to discuss the problem of the plates in a later essay.

26. Brodie, p. 84.

27. WJ, pp. 5-6.

28. Revelation 19:10, more usually interpreted to mean that “the prophetic spirit proves itself by witnessing to Jesus” (thus the New American Bible); WJ, pp. 10, 164, 214, 230; PW, p. 301; and cf. Alma II's preaching “according to the spirit which was in him, according to the testimony of Jesus” (BM, p. 239).

29. WJ, p. 230; for “sealing” see pp. 201, 330, and cf. Matthew 16:19 (KJV).

30. WJ, p. 4.

31. 1 Corinthians 2:14, 14:37; BC, 15:38-39; cf. Whitmer, p. 31.

32. BM, p. 46.

33. BC, 5:2, 10:7, 8:3 (cf. BM, p. 476).

34. WJ, p. 4; Times and Seasons, 15 June 1842, 823-24.

35. John Taylor, The Journal of Discourses: Reports of Addresses by Brigham Young and Others (Liverpool, 1853-86), 18:330.

36. Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography, 5th ed. (Salt Lake City, 1961), p. 61; WJ, p. 51.

37. BM, pp. 143, 141, 420, 441.

38. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and trans. Eugenia Haufmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 139.

39. WJ, p. 4.

40. BC, 1:5, cf. BM, p. 118; WJ, p. 12. Ehat and Cook see this as a reference to the deceptions of Satan (p. 430), but their interpretation is convincingly challenged by Anthony A. Hutchinson, “LDS Approaches to the Holy Bible,” Dialogue, 15 (1982), 123.

41. Hutchinson notes that “language” here “is far more than mere verbal systems; it can extend to thought forms and culturally conditioned mind sets” (p. 123).

42. Smith's letter of 20 March 1839 (Caleb Baldwin scribe), in PW, pp. 396-97.

43. WJ, p. 4.

44. BC, 8:3.

45. Richard L. Anderson, “By the Gift and Power of God,” The Ensign, September 1977, 83.

46. Hubble interview, Kimball, p. 486; Saints Herald, 21 June 1884, 396.

47. WJ, p. 34. This letter from M. L. Davis has an uncertain provenance (see Ehat and Cook's note, WJ, p. 46), but it is partially corroborated by a report in the Christian Advocate and Journal, 6 March 1840: WJ, p. 35.

48. Lucy Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations (1853; Lamoni, 1912), p. 92.

49. Lucy Smith, p. 92; letter of Daniel Hendrix, 2 February 1897, in Brodie, p. 26.

50. A letter from Lucy Mack Smith to Mary Pierce, 23 January 1829, says that the Book of Mormon was the subject of Smith's dreams: see The Ensign, October 1978, 73, but note that the authenticity of this letter has been questioned.

51. Lucy Smith, pp. 151-55.

52. BC, 7:1-2.

53. D. Michael Quinn, “The First Months of Mormonism: A Contemporary View by Reverend Diedrich Willers,” New York History, 54 (1973), 326.

54. WJ, pp. 4-6. Smith's argument is strained, for the second Comforter of John 14:16 can hardly be “other” to the Holy Ghost, since the Holy Ghost is not mentioned until v. 26.

55. BM, p. 121, dated June 1829 by Jessee, “The Original Book of Mormon Manuscript,” Brigham Young University Studies, 10 (1969), 278.

56. This also lies behind BC, 15:38-39 and 53:17-18.

57. BC, 7:1, 10:7.

58. Anderson, p. 83.

59. WJ, p. 81.

60. Roberts, History, 1:105; cf. PW, pp. 246-47.

61. Memorandum by John H. Gilbert, 8 September 1892, in Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work (Salt Lake City, 1958), 1:xv-xvi.

62. Stevenson, Desert News, 30 November 1881.

63. Matthews, p. 40.

64. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1930; Provo, 1965), 2:100.

65. Smith, The Holy Scriptures … An Inspired Revision of the Authorized Version, 2nd ed. (Independence, 1844); PW, p. 358; WJ, p. 169 (cf. Smith's words in late 1841: “Every man who lived on this earth was entitled to a seer stone”; see Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, 20 February 1864, 118-19).

66. Cf. Samuel Hopkins, “System of Doctrines” (1793) for the idea of increased knowledge hereafter: Works (Boston, 1852), 1:352 and 2:60-62.

67. BC, 8:4; Phillip Schaff, ed., A Religious Encyclopedia (New York, 1882-84), 2:1577.

68. Church News, 28 April 1985, p. 6.

69. Jerald Tanner, “LDS Documents and Murder,” Salt Lake City Messenger, January 1986, 1-25.

70. Tanner, p. 6; cf. the account of Harris' explanation in the Rochester Gem, 5 September 1829, in Francis W. Kirkham, A New Witness for Christ in America, 4th ed. (Provo, 1967), 1:151—“a man named Joseph Smith … said that he had been visited by the spirit of the Almighty in a dream, and informed that in a certain hill in that town was deposited a Golden Bible. …”

71. BC, 7:3.

72. Joseph Capron, in E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic] (Painesville, 1834), p. 259; Howe's collection of anti-Mormon testimonies is criticized by Hill, pp. 88-89.

73. Willard Chase, in Howe, p. 242.

74. Lucy Smith, pp. 92-94.

75. PW, p. 7.

76. Discussing Mexican treasure tales, Soledad Pérez notes that seekers had to rid themselves of “avaricious thoughts or ideas” if they were to succeed: “Mexican Folklore from Austin Texas,” in Wilson M. Hudson, ed., “The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore,” Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, 24 (1951), 97.

77. See Western Farmer, 19 September 1821, in Brodie, p. 35; Peter Ingersoll, in Howe, p. 236.

78. His father hoped then that God would one day “manifest His will concerning this marvelous power”; see W. D. Purple's article in the Chenango Union, 3 May 1877, in Kirkham, 1:481.

79. For Smith using the violated taboo as an excuse for failure in treasure digging see Larry C. Porter and Jan Shipps, “The Colesville, New York, ‘Exodus’ Seen from Two Documentary Perspectives,” New York History, 62 (1981), 207, and William Stafford, in Howe, p. 239; by 1839 Smith was explaining his failure by his need to be instructed by angels before he could receive the plates (PW, p. 206).

80. Jon Butler, “Magic Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760,” American Historical Review, 84 (1978), 317-46, notes how some Americans saw no conflict between Christianity and magic.

81. Lucy Smith, pp. 119, 123. Reed Durham remarked upon Smith's use of a Jupiter talisman in Nauvoo, in his 1974 presidential address to the Mormon History Association.

82. W. N. Schors notes how frequently aids to clairvoyance become aids to superstition in his introduction to Noud Van Eerenbeembt, The Pendulum, Crystal Ball and Magic Mirror: Their Use in Magical Practice (Wellingborough, 1982), p. 9.

83. See Truman G. Madsen, “Guest Editor's Prologue,” Brigham Young University Studies, 10 (1969), 254.

84. Whitmer, p. 32.

85. Millennial Harbinger, February 1831, in Brodie, pp. 69-70.

86. BM, p. 67.

87. Schors, p. 9.

88. Hawthorne, “The Haunted Mind,” quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Experience in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, 1941), p. 232. Possibly Smith at times saw images of Book of Mormon scenes (cf. Lorenzo Barne's reminiscence of what Smith said about his Bible translation: Matthews, pp. 25-26), but his text would nevertheless have been verbally inspired.

89. A ms. of the first chapter and a half of the “Book of Abraham” sets the English text alongside hieroglyphics, but this is more probably an attempt to match up a completed translation with hieroglyphs than an attempt to translate: Hugh Nibley, “As Things Stand at the Present,” Brigham Young University Studies, 9 (1968), 97.

90. Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, December 1835, 234-37; for the text of the “Book of Abraham,” see The Pearl of Great Price (1851; Salt Lake City, 1969); for a translation of the papyrus used by Smith—which shows it to be an unremarkable funerary text with no Abrahamic reference—see Richard A. Parker, “The Book of Breathings (Fragment 1, the ‘Sensen’ Text, with restorations from Louvre Papyrus 3284), “Dialogue, 3 (1968), 98-99 but note that Nibley argues in The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City, 1975) that “at no time was any Egyptian text put forward as the original of the Book of Abraham” (p. 2).

91. Brodie, pp. 171-72; for a contrary view see Edward T. Jones, “The Theology of Thomas Dick and Its Possible Relationship to that of Joseph Smith,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1969, but cf. E. Robert Paul, “Early Mormon Intellectuals: Parley P. and Orson Pratt—A Response,” Dialogue, 15 (1983), 44.

92. Bertrand Russell, “How I Write,” Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London, 1965), p. 195.

93. Hopkins, 1:413; Joseph Bellamy, “True Religion Delineated” (1750) in Works (Boston, 1853), 1:88; BM, pp. 117, 535-36, 579.

94. Nathaniel Emmons, “The Plenary Inspiration of the Scriptures,” in The Works (Boston, 1842), 4:74-76.

95. Roberts, History, 1:3.