whom he induced to perjure himself in order to furnish corroborative evidence to his own statement. The presumption is that his own standing in the community as to truth and veracity was such that corroborative evidence was needed to carry conviction. The difference between him and Jesus Christ, touching that matter, is, that when the latter needed corroborative evidence, He walked on the water, turned water into wine, fed five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, or raised the dead, instead of professing to read from mysterious plates from behind a screen.

Now, since the originals "mysteriously disappeared," and could not be produced in court, a case for the Mormon faith would have to be based upon the copy of the same, and this was obtained from dictation behind a curtain, to a copyist who ackowledged himself to be a perjurer and faker. The Mormon faith has the disadvantage of not being based upon an "ancient document" nor upon a credible copy of one, and that there is not "an absence of circumstances which generate suspicion" in the origin of the Book of Mormon.

Lastly, the Book of Mormon is further dif ferentiated from the Sinaitic manuscript by the fact that it does not contain the evidence

of presumptive innocence, nor is it sustained by positive evidence aliunde. We place up against the claim of authenticity for that book the testimony of credible witnesses to the effect, that

"In reality it was written in the year 1812 as an historical romance by one Soloman Spaulding, a crackbrained preacher; and the MS. falling into the hands of an unscrupulous compositor, Sidney Rigdon, was copied by him, and subsequently given to Joseph Smith. Armed with this book and with self-assumed divine authority, the latter soon began to attract followers." (Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

It may be stated with the utmost confidence that the Book of Mormon, as an authentic document, would have no legal standing in a court of law, if the issue were properly raised, and, while we have not the time to discuss it here, the same thing may be said of the Koran, the book of Mohammedan faith.

DIVISION II.

THE CREDIBILITY OF WITNESSES

We will now take up the subject of the credibility of the witnesses. The Scriptural record discloses a number of them, and it becomes pertinent to inquire into the matter of who they are and what weight they carry in their testimony. Their evidence will be of little use to us unless we find that it carries with it probative force. Whether it does or not, depends upon several things. Their testimony having been admitted, the legal presumption is that they told the truth, and the burden of proof is shifted to the shoulders of those who attack their credibility to show that it is not the truth. In this connection, we again refer to that great authority, Professor Greenleaf, who says:

"Proceeding further to inquire whether the facts related by the Four Evangelists are proved by competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led, first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the credibility of the witnesses. On this point the mu

nicipal law furnishes a rule which is of constant application in all trials by jury, and is indeed the dictate of that charity which thinketh no evil.

"In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown, the burden of impeaching his credibility lying on the objector.

"This rule serves to show the injustice with which the writers of the Gospels have ever been treated by infidels; an injustice silently acquiesced in even by Christians; in requiring the Christian affirmatively, and by positive evidence, aliunde to establish the credibility of his witnesses above all others, before their testimony is entitled to be considered, and in permitting the testimony of a single profane writer, alone and uncorroborated, to outweigh that of any single Christian. This is not the course in courts of chancery, where the testimony of a single witness is never permitted to outweigh the oath of even the defendant himself, interested as he is in the case; but, on the contrary, if the plaintiff, after having required the oath of his adversary, cannot overthrow it by something more than the oath of one witness, however credible, it must stand as evidence against him. But the Christian writer seems, by the usual course of the argu- . ment, to have been deprived of the common presumption of charity in his favor; and reversing the ordinary rule of administering jus

tice in human tribunals, his testimony is unjustly presumed to be false, until it is proved to be true. This treatment, moreover, has been applied to them all in a body; and without due regard to the fact, that, being independent historians, writing at different periods, they are entitled to the support of each other; they have been treated, in the argument, almost as if the New Testament were the entire production, at once, of a body of men, conspiring by joint fabrication, to impose a false religion upon the world. It is time that this injustice should cease; that the testimony of the evangelists should be admitted to be true, until it can be disproved by those who would impugn it; that the silence of one sacred writer on any point should no more detract from his own veracity or that of other historians, than the like circumstances is permitted to do among profane writers; and that the Four Evangelists should be admitted in corroboration of each other, as readily as Josephus and Tacitus, or Polibius and Livy."

It will be noticed that Professor Greenleaf is careful to state the rule to be that "in the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is to be presumed credible."

To illustrate this, the Book of Mormon and the Scriptures may be compared. There is nothing to generate suspicion attached to the