Evangelizing Mormons
The cult organized by Joseph Smith under the title “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” at Fayette, New York, in 1830. Smith claimed that the angel Moroni visited him, and that with the aid of Urim and Thummim he translated the golden plates which contained the history of early America “in reformed Egyptian characters.” The plates were supposedly hidden from the year A.D. 420 until Smith found them on September 22, 1823. The translation was called The Book of Mormon. Hidden since the year 420, it has extensive quotations from the King James Version of the Bible, which dates from 1611! It contains expressions and ideas which are exclusively modern, and “its story of the ancient inhabitants of America, the supposed ancestors of the ‘Latter-Day Saints,’ contains twelve historical errors” (Van Baalen, The Chaos of Cults, p. 152). This garbled production is regarded by Mormons as equal in authority to the Bible.
The religious and social system of the Latter-day Saints; so called from their gospel, termed The Book of Mormon. Joe Smith, the founder of the system, was born in Sharon, Windsor county, Vermont; his partner was Rigdon. The manuscript, which he declared to be written on gold plates, was a novel written by Spalding. He was cited thirty-nine times into courts of law, and was at last assassinated by a gang of ruffians, who broke into his prison at Carthage, and shot him like a dog. His wife’s name was Emma; he lived at Nauvoo, in Illinois; his successor was Brigham Young, a carpenter by trade, who led the “Saints” (as the Mormons are called), driven from home by force, to the valley of the Salt Lake, 1,500 miles distant, generally called Utah, but by the Mormons themselves Deseret (Bee-country), the New Jerusalem. Abraham is their model man, and Sarai their model woman, and English their language. Young’s house was called the Bee-hive. Every man, woman, and child capable of work has work to do in the community.
The Book of Mormon, translated by Joseph *Smith in the 1820s, tells the story of a godly race of early settlers in America who were reduced by warfare to only two, Mormon and his son, Moroni. According to the document, the two wrote their history on golden plates and buried them in a hillside in upstate New York, where Smith later claimed to discover them.
“There is an abundance of incontestable evidence that the origin of the Book of Mormon must be sought in Solomon Spaulding’s unpublished and stolen novel, The Manuscript Found. The Mormons try to obliterate this evidence by referring to another manuscript, The Manuscript Story, by the same Spaulding; they prove that the Book of Mormon is not a copy of the latter manuscript. The unknowing are thus convinced that Joseph Smith did not copy from ‘the Spaulding manuscript’; but the real argument, that the ‘Golden Bible’ is the work of copying and embellishing by Rigdon and Smith, remains unanswered” (Van Baalen, p. 152).
Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism, died when an angry crowd stormed the gaol where he was being kept on charges of gross immorality, counterfeiting, and sheltering criminals.
1. The Fatherhood of God. “When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him.… He is our father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 1:50).
2. God’s Unity. “The passages are numerous in the inspired writings which indicate a plurality of God” (F. D. Richards, Compendium, p. 170). “And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light and there was light. And they (the Gods) comprehended the light … and they divided the light” (Joseph Smith, The Pearl of Great Price, p. 67).
“Each of these Gods, including Jesus Christ and His Father, being in possession of not merely an organized spirit, but a glorious body of flesh and bones, is subject to the laws which govern, of necessity, even the most refined order of physical existence” (Parley Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology, p. 42).
3. God’s Trinity. “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones but is a personage of spirit.… Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us. A man may receive the Holy Ghost, and it may descend upon him, and not tarry with him” (Joseph Smith, Doctrine and Covenants, p. 462).
4. Polygamy. “Jesus Christ was a polygamist; Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, were his plural wives, and Mary Magdalene was another. Also, the bridal feast of Cana of Galilee, where Jesus turned the water into wine, was on the occasion of one of his own marriages” (Brigham Young, quoted in Wife No. 19, chap. 34, by Ann Eliza Young).
“We say it was Jesus Christ who was married (at Cana, to Martha and Mary), whereby he could see his own seed before he was crucified. The reference is to Isaiah 53:10” (Orson Hyde, cf. The True Origin of Mormon Polygamy, by C. A. Shook, p. 207).
5. Virgin Birth. “When the Virgin Mary conceived the child Jesus, the Father had begotten him in his own likeness. He was NOT begotten by the Holy Ghost. And who was the Father? He was the first of the human family.… Jesus, our elder brother, was begotten in the flesh by the same character that was in the garden of Eden, and who is our Father in Heaven” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 1:50).
6. Justification. “The sectarian dogma of justification by faith alone has exercised an influence for evil since the early days of Christianity” (James E. Talmadge, The Articles of Faith, p. 120).
“Abraham received concubines and they bare him children, and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. Go ye therefore and do the works of Abraham, enter ye into my law, and ye shall be saved. But if ye enter not into my law [of polygamy], ye cannot receive the promise of my Father, which he made unto Abraham” (Joseph Smith, Celestial Marriage, par. 12, 14).
“Now, that the blessing of redemption from individual sins, while free for all to attain, is nevertheless conditioned on individual effort, is as plainly declared as is the truth of unconditional redemption from the effects of the Fall” (James E. Talmadge, p. 42).