Therefore it shall come to pass that whosoever will not believe in my words, who am Jesus Christ, whom the Father shall cause him to bring forth unto the Gentiles, and shall give unto him power that he shall bring them forth unto the Gentiles, (it shall be done even as Moses said), they shall be cut off from among my people who are of the covenant. And my people who are a remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles, yea, in the midst of them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as the young lion among the flock of sheep, who, if he go through both treadeth down and teareth to pieces, and none can deliver. Their hand shall be lifted up upon their adversaries, and all their enemies shall be cut off. Yea, wo be unto the Gentiles, except they repent, for it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Father, that I will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy thy chariots, and I will cut off the cities of thy land, and throw down all thy strongholds; and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy hand, and thou shalt have no more soothsayers; thy graven images I will also cut off, and thy standing images out of the midst of thee, and thou shalt no more worship the works of thy hands; and I will pluck up thy groves out of the midst of thee; so will I destroy thy cities. And it shall come to pass that all lying, and deceiving, and envying, and strifes, and priestcrafts, and whoredoms, shall be done away. For it shall come to pass, saith the Father, that at that day whosoever will not repent and come unto my beloved Son, them will I cut off from among my people. O house of Israel; and I will execute vengeance and fury upon them, even as upon the heathen, such as they have not heard. But if they [the Gentiles] will repent, and hearken unto my words, and harden not their hearts, I will establish my church among them and they shall come in unto the covenant, and be numbered among this remnant of Jacob, unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance. And they shall assist my people, the remnant of Jacob, and also, as many of the house of Israel as shall come, that they may build a city, which shall be called the New Jerusalem; and then shall they assist my people that they may be gathered in, who are scattered upon all the face of the land, in unto the New Jerusalem. And then shall the power of heaven come down among them; and I also will be in the midst.[[29]]
Here then is the conditional prophecy that it concerns the proud Gentile races now inhabiting the American continents to know. These continents are a promised land; they are given primarily to the descendants of the Patriarch Joseph as an inheritance, but the Gentile races are also given an inheritance in them with the descendants of Joseph. The whole land, however, is dedicated to righteousness and liberty, and the people who possess it, whether of the house of Israel or Gentiles, must be a righteous people, and worship the "God of the land, who is Jesus Christ." In that event God stands pledged to preserve the land and the people thereof from all other nations, and to bless them with very great and peculiar blessings guaranteeing to them freedom and peaceful possession of the land forever. If the Gentile races shall observe these conditions they and their children are to share in the blessings of the land in connection with the descendants of the Patriarch Joseph. If they depart from justice, reject righteousness and Jesus Christ, then the judgments decreed will overtake them until they are wasted away. This is the decree of God respecting the Western hemisphere, and is one of the important messages that the Book of Mormon has to deliver to the present generation.
Nor is it the Book of Mormon alone that bears this message. So far as the people of the United States are concerned, I might say, if not one of their own prophets, at least their greatest statesman, gave substantially the same warning to the people of that nation, and I believe his utterances are equally applicable to the people occupying the other parts of the American continents. Read the following quotation from the speech delivered a few months before its author's death, and tell me if the American statesman, Daniel Webster, did not catch the same glow of inspiration when predicting the terms upon which the people now occupying our country may hold their heritage, as that which warmed the hearts of the Book of Mormon writers and speakers, whose words are quoted in the preceding passages. Mr. Webster's speech was delivered before the "New York Historical Society," on February 22nd—Washington's birthday—1852; as the great American died in October following, the address was one of his last speeches.
Unborn ages and visions of glory crowd upon my soul, the realization of all which, however, is in the hands and good pleasure of Almighty God; but, under his divine blessing, it will be dependent on the character and the virtues of ourselves, and of our posterity. If classical history has been found to be, is now, and shall continue to be, the concomitant of free institutions, and of popular eloquence, what a field is opening to us for another Herodotus, another Thucydides, and another Livy!
And let me say, gentlemen, that if we and our posterity shall be true to the Christian religion—if we and they shall live always in the fear of God, and shall respect his commandments, if we and they shall maintain just, moral sentiments, and such conscientious convictions of duty as shall control the heart and life—we may have the highest hopes of the future fortunes of our country; and if we maintain those institutions of government and that political union, exceeding all praise as much as it exceeds all former examples of political associations, we may be sure of one thing—that, while our country furnishing materials for a thousand masters of the historic art, it will afford no topic for a Gibbon. It will have no Decline and Fall. It will go on prospering and to prosper.
But, if we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity. Should that catastrophe happen, let it have no history! Let the horrible narrative never be written! Let its fate be like that of the lost books of Livy, which no human eye shall ever read; or the missing Pleiad, of which no man can ever know more, than that it is lost, and lost forever!
I think my statement will be within reasonable limits when I say that this sublime doctrine and warning of Mr. Webster's has the same source of inspiration as the utterances of the Book of Mormon writers. I believe that all who read and compare these passages will conclude there is something more than mere coincidence in their agreement.
As before stated, it is not my purpose in calling attention to these conditional prophecies to point to their fulfillment, either accomplished or prospective, in evidence of the truth of the Book of Mormon. Their worth as evidence to the truth of the book rests solely upon the importance of the matter with which they deal. The demand of the world is, and it is a reasonable one, that a book purporting to be a revelation from God should deal with subjects that it is important for men to know, and I regard the terms that constitute the conditions upon which the American continents may be securely held by the people who possess them, as a matter of the highest importance for the people to know, and hence worthy to be found in a book purporting to be a revelation from God. Such knowledge is no less important than to know the source whence the continents of America are peopled; the providences of God in dealing with them; and the fact that the Son of God visited the western hemisphere, and taught to the inhabitants thereof the gospel, and established here his church for the perpetuation of the truth and for the salvation of men. All this is revealed in the Book of Mormon, and makes up a mass of knowledge that it concerns mankind to know, and hence is worthy of God to reveal. Had the Book of Mormon dealt with light or trivial things—things unworthy of God to reveal, mankind would require no further evidence that its claims to a divine origin were baseless; and conversely: if the book reveals a mass of knowledge—worthy of God to reveal and important for man to know—then it is evidence of considerable weight that the book is of God.
Footnotes
[1]. II. Nephi xxx: 3-11.
[2]. II. Nephi xxx: 12-15.
[3]. "Descendants of the Jews." This expression, I believe, is used in this instance as equivalent to "Descendants of the house of Israel." That is, the American Indians will know they are Israelites. This sense of the phrase "the Jews" is used in other parts of the Book of Mormon: for instance, "That the father may bring about * * * his great and eternal purposes, in restoring the Jews, or all the House of Israel, to the land of their inheritance." We have already pointed out in previous foot notes that according to the Book of Mormon the American Indians are a mixture of the tribes of Manasseh, Ephraim and Judah (see pp. 95, 325-6); and therefore we think the phrase "descendants of the Jews," does not mean to confine native American race descent to the Jews alone, but merely to say that they are descendants of the House of Israel, for which "Jews" here stands as equivalent.