[Footnote 192: Doctrine and Covenants, 63:55 and 65.]
It is needless to add they each received a house, and both stood for many years, and perhaps even to this day, side by side, and both built according to the same plans.[193]
[Footnote 193: "Gleanings by the Way," 332.]
CONCLUDING COMMENT.
The case, so far as the production of evidence is concerned, must now be considered closed. The actors in this fraud are all dead, and upon the precise question here discussed no new evidence is likely to be discovered. All the evidence directly affecting either side of the question has been introduced and reviewed.
When, as here, we are investigating a case dependent upon circumstantial evidence, we must judge the evidence as a whole. No one circumstance out of many connected ones ever established the ultimate fact. The converse of this proposition is equally true. You cannot show the insufficiency of the evidence by demonstrating that any one circumstance, if it stood alone, would be equally consistent with some other theory than the one in support of which it is cited. The evidentiary circumstances must be viewed as a whole, each in the light of its relation to all the rest. Thus viewed, the circumstantial evidence is strong just in proportion as the circumstances related to, and consistent with, the theory advocated are numerous. In the argument under consideration the circumstantial facts are so numerous, and gathered from so many disconnected sources, corroborated by so many admissions from the accused conspirators and their defenders, that it is utterly impossible to believe them all to have come into being as a mere matter of accidental concomitance.
Let us put the defenders of the divinity of Mormonism to a test on this matter by inviting them to make an equally good case of circumstantial evidence based upon established fact, all tending to show some other human origin for the Book of Mormon than that here advocated. Inability to do so means that such an array of concurring facts cannot be duplicated in support of any other theory than the one here advocated. If, as must now be admitted, the concurrence of so very many facts can best be explained by the conclusions here contended for, then that is a more believable, a more rational conviction than one which of necessity requires belief in an assumed and unprovable miracle. That explanation which takes the least for granted is always the one adopted by the sanest person. Bearing in mind these truths, let us briefly review a portion of the most salient features of the argument.
From the uncontradicted evidence of witnesses, practically all of whom are disinterested and who in most circumstances of great evidentiary weight are corroborated by authorized church publications, we have established beyond cavil, and I am sure to the satisfaction of all thinking minds untainted by mysticism, and whose vision is unobscured, that the following are thoroughly established facts:
Solomon Spaulding, between 1812 and 1816, outlined and then re-wrote a novel, attempting therein to account for the American Indian by Israelitish origin. The first outline of this story, now at Oberlin College, had no direct connection with the Book of Mormon, and was never claimed to be connected with it, and such connection was expressly disclaimed as early as 1834. The rewritten story, entitled "Manuscript Found," was by Spaulding twice left with a publisher, whence it was stolen under circumstances which then led Spaulding to suspect Sidney Rigdon, who long after was the first conspicuous convert of Mormonism; that Rigdon, through his great intimacy with the publishers' employees, had opportunity to steal it, and that after Spaulding's death, and years before the advent of Mormonism, Rigdon had in his possession such a manuscript and exhibited it, with the statement that it was Spaulding's. Through Parley P. Pratt, Rigdon and Smith were brought into relation, and the latter made the Prophet of the "Dispensation of the Fullness of Times," the discoverer, translator, and, according to his own designation, the "Author and Proprietor"[194] of the Book of Mormon. This connection is established by the most convincing circumstantial evidence, taken wholly from authorized Mormon publications; it is shown that Rigdon foreknew the coming and in a general way the contents of the Book of Mormon; that both Rigdon and Pratt were, according to some of their contradictory accounts, converted to Mormonism with such miraculous suddenness and without substantial investigation that when this, coupled with the contradictory accounts of these important events and their attempts at concealing the suddenness of their conversion, all compel a conviction of their participation in a scheme of religious fraud.
[Footnote 194: Smith designates himself as the "Author and Proprietor" of God's word, in the Title Page of the Book of Mormon, also in the testimony of the witnesses as it appears in the first edition, since which time both have been altered. See also Evening and Morning Star, 117.]