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5i8 Popular Bibles The Jaredites, extinct by 590 B.C., are thus reported to have occupied both North and South America for about 1850 years. Then came Lehi and his company to this continent to develop into segregated nations, Nephites and Lemanites; the former disappearing about 385 A.D., the latter degenerating into the Indians of a century ago. In consequence the Book of Mormon becomes an effort to transplant Hebraic traditions, though scholarship takes no such hegtra seriously, and the volume depends for its validity on evidence and assertion presented by itself and accepted only by those convinced by the same. To "Gentiles" objecting to any new revelation beyond the Bible, the Book of Mormon, offering itself as proof that it is valid, reports Jesus as saying, "Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word?" The Book was launched at a moment favorable to its ac- ceptance by a certain type of the well-meaning but unschooled^ The modern interpretation of the Bible had not begtm. Literal- ism was still in the saddle. Books such as Lux Mundi had not appeared. Matthew Arnold was not yet startling the con- ventional with his coimsel to rest heavily on some things in the Bible, on others lightly. The revisers of the King James ver- sion, were still a half century from their work which was to be followed by successive revisions until every little while sees a new translation of at least the New Testament, It is with such a background that the man of modern training approaches^ the Bible, and to him the Book of Mormon seems something bom out of due season. Again, when Joseph Smith received in 1827 — as the Book affirms — the "Golden Plates" first published in 1830, the New World, particularly west of the Alleghanies, was plunging into various religious extravagances, the wonders which the with- drawing frontier spread before the pioneer were on many a tongue, the origin of the Indians was a live issue, and wiseacres here and there identified them with the lost tribes. It was a day when men still dreamed of and dug for treasures buried by Spaniards or by Kidd. The Masonic-Morgan mystery and the Fox sisters found in Western New York a local habitation and people were still alive there who recalled the "Jerusalem" of Jemima Wilkinson. Mesmerism and the miracxilous were of