They do not believe in the ministry of angels, in miracles, in signs, in dreams and in visions. The book had its origin in those things, much of it is made up of an account of them.
Lehi, the most prominent patriarch of the aboriginal American race, was warned by an angel that Jerusalem would be destroyed; 1 Nephi 1. 11, 13. That he might not be destroyed with it, the Lord warned him in a dream to take his family and depart into the wilderness; 2. 2. In the nineteenth verse of this last chapter, the Lord spake to Nephi, and blessed him on account of his great faith.
Nephi, who wrote the first two books of the Book of Mormon, had wonderful visions and manifestations. An infidel, or deist, having no faith in manifestations from God, could not have written the book; equally impossible that it could have been written by a sectarian Christian.
Was the Book of Mormon written for a romance? It would spoil the interest of a work of fiction, for the writer to commence it with a sketch of the plan of his story. Yet the two books of Nephi, which commence the Book of Mormon, are a very plain, prophetic sketch of the then future history of the people of America.
Besides, what writer of fiction could expect to interest the literary world of the nineteenth century, with an account of the organization of a church, on the American continent, exactly after the pattern of the primitive church in Asia, with advocating baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, and with an almost verbatim repetition of Christ's sermon on the Mount. Such a fiction would be wanting in all the elements of modern romance.
Skeptics, Christian divines, and writers of romance are not the men to stake their reputation on the enunciation of such principles as the following: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not and is not baptized shall be damned." "Harlotry is the most abominable of all sins in the sight of God, except it be the sin against the Holy Ghost." In fact, it is the teaching of such pure principles in the Book of Mormon that makes it so very unpopular with a large portion of mankind.
The Book of Mormon, as a whole, must be either true or false. If false, the Bible is equally so, for there is no antagonism between the two.
The former states that it and the Bible shall grow together for the confounding of false doctrine in the latter times. The writer of a book of errors would hardly have staked his reputation on the fact that his book was an evidence of the truth of the Bible, and vice versa. That one is a witness of the truth of the other is readily evident to any one who will honestly compare them.
Written by different authors, under very different circumstances, and on opposite sides of the globe, such perfect concordance would have been impossible, unless the authors had all been actuated by the same Spirit of divine inspiration.
The admission is general that the Bible was written and compiled on the Eastern hemisphere, and, more or less continuously through a period of some 1500 years. The fact is generally recognized that the Book of Mormon was written on the Western hemisphere, and by those who had nothing to do in getting up the Bible.