Upon the question of plagiarism, we may profitably add a brief summary of the points of identity between the peculiar features shown to be common to Spaulding's novel and the Book of Mormon. In Spaulding's first outline of the story it pretended to be ancient American history, attempting to explain the origin of part of the aborigines of this continent, all translated from ancient writings found in a stone box. It recounts the wars of extermination of two factions, tells of the collecting of armies and of slaughters which were a physical impossibility to those uncivilized people who were without any modern methods of transporting troops or army supplies. After two revisions, one by Spaulding and a second by Smith, Rigdon & Co., the above general outline still describes equally well the Book of Mormon.
Leaving the first blocking-out of his novel unfinished, Spaulding resolved to change his plot by dating the story farther back and by attempting to imitate the Old Scripture style, so as to make it seem more ancient. Spaulding's determination to date his novel farther back probably suggested changing the roll of parchment which, according to the Oberlin manuscript, was found in a stone box, to golden plates. Some time before 1820 some one pretended to have found a Golden Bible in Canada.[195] If Spaulding, in rewriting the story, did not make the change, this incident may have suggested such a change to Smith and his fellow-frauds.
[Footnote 195: Braden-Kelly Debate, 55.]
Spaulding, in his attempt at imitating Bible phraseology, had repeated so ridiculously often the words "it came to pass," that both in Ohio and Pennsylvania the neighbors to whom he read his manuscript nicknamed him "Old Come-to-pass." In the Book of Mormon, though professedly an abridgment, the same phrase is uselessly repeated several thousand times, and a bungling effort at imitating the style of Bible writers is apparent all through it.
Spaulding's existence was contemporaneous with Anti-Masonic riots, and he harbored a sentiment against all secret societies,[196] which has also been carried through into the Book of Mormon.
[Footnote 196: "Howe's Mormonism Unveiled," 288.]
The uncontradicted and unimpeached evidence of many witnesses is explicit that the historical portions of both the "Manuscript Found" and the "Book of Mormon" are the same, and much of the religious matter interpolated is in the exact phraseology of King James's translation of the Bible. We find also many names of places, persons, and tribes to be identical in the "Manuscript Found" and the Book of Mormon. Some of the names were taken from the Bible, others would be known only to the students of American antiquities, among whom was Spaulding, and still others were unheard of until coined by Spaulding. The names proven to be common to both are Nephi, Lehi, Mormon, Nephites, Lamanites, Laban, Zarahemla and Amlicites.
Add to this the very novel circumstance that in both accounts one of two contending armies placed upon the forehead of its soldiers a red mark that they might distinguish friends from enemies, and the new and characteristic features common to both are too numerous to admit of any explanation except that herein contended for, viz: That the Book of Mormon is a plagiarism from Spaulding's novel, the "Manuscript Found," and is the product of conscious fraud on the part of Sidney Rigdon, Parley Parker Pratt, Joseph Smith, and others, which fraud was prompted wholly by a love of notoriety and money.
THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOK OF MORMON.
BY BRIGHAM H. ROBERTS