A few lines extending on the next page completes the picture of peace and happiness that shall ultimately be diffused over the earth in that day:
12. And then shall the wolf dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling, together; and a little child shall lead them.
13. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
14. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den.
15. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.[[2]]
Let us now consider this prophetic page item by item.
I.
Many Shall Believe the Words of the Book.
For after the book of which I have spoken [i. e. the Book of Mormon] shall come forth and be written unto the Gentiles and sealed up again unto the Lord, there shall be many which shall believe the words which are written.
Whether this declaration be accredited to the first Nephi, five hundred years B. C., or allowed no other authorship than Joseph Smith, and no greater antiquity than 1830, when the Book of Mormon was published, it is equally prophetic in character. And if it be insisted upon that it had no earlier origin than Joseph Smith's utterance of it, then it becomes all the more remarkable as a prophecy; for by the time it was put forth by him, he had very good reason—human reason—to doubt if the Book of Mormon would be extensively believed, or believed in at all; for by this time such opposition had appeared against it, and such ridicule and derision heaped upon himself and associates; and everywhere there had been such a manifestation of opposition to the forth-coming book, that naturally one would wonder if it would be overwhelmed by a universal ignoring of it. Still there stands the prediction:
There shall be many which shall believe the words which are written.
The only question is, Has it been fulfilled? In answer we have only to point to the present membership of the Church in all the world, say three hundred thousand people. But to the number of those who now believe it, and hold it to be a volume of sacred scripture, there must be added all those who have died in the faith; and again those who once accepted it in their faith and afterwards, by transgression, lost the spirit of the work and departed from the Church; but who, singularly enough, in the majority of cases, still continued to assert their faith in the truth of the Book of Mormon. And then to all those numbers there must be added that still greater number of people who have been brought to a belief in the Book of Mormon, but who have not had sufficient moral courage to forfeit their good standing among their fellows, and make other sacrifices involved in a public profession of their faith.
Let the numbers of these several classes be added together and beyond question the prophecy has been fulfilled. Many have believed in the Nephite scriptures.