The Mormonizing of America by Stephen Mansfield

Author:Stephen Mansfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worthy Publishing
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

At the moment I happened to think of what I had heard about a history found in Canada, called the golden Bible; so I very gravely told them it was the golden Bible. To my surprise, they were credulous enough to believe what I said. Accordingly, I told them that I had received a commandment to let no one see it, for, says I, no man can see it with the naked eye and live. However, I offered to take out the book and show it to them, but they refused to see it, and left the room. Now, I have got the damned fools fixed and will carry out the fun.6

Ingersoll also remembered that Smith “told me he had no such book, and believed there never was any such book.” Yet, to deceive his family and the naive, Smith “made a box … of clap-boards, and put it into a pillow case, and allowed people only to lift it, and feel of it through the case.”7

Another Smith acquaintance reported that the whole deception began as an attempt on Smith’s part to manipulate this acquaintance into building a chest. The man refused, and, “A few days afterward, he told one of my neighbors that he had not got any such book, nor never had such an one; but that he had told the story to deceive the d—d fool, (meaning me,) to get him to make a chest.”8

For recounting these recollections in her book and for making the case that Smith cynically invented the revelations that became Mormonism, Brodie was criticized by the Church but honored by non-LDS scholars and reviewers. In 1946, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated Professor Brodie. She considered the act a gift of liberation.

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