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CHAPTER XXVIII Popular Bibles I. The Book of Mormon THE Book of Mormon is a curiosity of literature. It is evidently an effort to reconstruct in archaic language the Hebraic age and to project by a special process some of its characters into nineteenth-ceritiury life, as well as to place the civilization they represent in an American setting. Just as Chatterton appealed to those interested in a Gothic revival, Joseph Smith, for whom the claim is made that the Book of Mormon was revealed to him in 1827, assumed a permanence of interest in the verbalism of the Old Testament. He also appealed to those who were curious about American antiqui- ties, speculative about the lost Ten Tribes reported by tradition to have found their way to the New World, and eager both to excavate prehistoric mounds and to decipher the picture writings of the Aborigines. Without professing that the Book is a substitute for the Bible, such authoritative interpreters as Professor James E. Talmage, one of the Twelve Apostles of the Mormon Church, ■does call it "a parallel volume of Scripture," and claims that "the Nephite and the Jewish Scriptures are found to agree in all matters of tradition, history, doctrine, and prophecy upon which both the separate records treat." It is distinctly stated that "America was settled by the Jaredites, who came direct from the scenes of Babel," that the Aborigines also came from the East, and were followed by peoples at least closely allied to the Israelites, that the existing native races of America were born of a common stock, and that the so-called historical part of the Book of Mormon has adequate testimony to its claims. 517