Joseph Smith knew that the many people who believed in the damnation of unbaptized infants would not want their theories molested, yet the Nephite historians had written that, "Little children are alive in Christ. . . . He that supposeth that little children need baptism is in the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity. It is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptise little children. . . . For awful is the wickedness to suppose that God saveth one child because of baptism and the other must perish because he hath no baptism." (Moroni 8:9-15)

The shadow of the impostor's hand does not fall across the pages of this holy book. "The Manuscript Found," "The View of the Hebrews" or no other literary production of the nineteenth century could possibly have been the underlying text of the Book of Mormon. Its philosophies are foreign to those of all preachers and Bible students of that time. It describes an ecclesiastical organization established among the Nephites by the resurrected Lord, which was unlike any church that Joseph Smith was acquainted with.

In this book some rather severe criticisms were made of the Bible, a thing which no deceiver would dare to do. Long before the scholars of the world developed the school of thought known as Higher Criticism, the Book of Mormon said many things about that subject which have since been verified. A Nephite prophet said of the transmission of the sacred writings:

"They have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious, and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away . . . because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceeding great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them." (I Nephi 13:26, 29.)