a terrible earthquake announced the crucifixion of Christ at Jerusalem, and three days afterward the Lord himself descended out of heaven into the chief city of the Nephites, in sight of all the people, whom he exhibited his wounded side and the prints of the nails in his hands and feet. He remained among them 40 days, instructing them in Christianity and instituting Christian churches. The Christians of America, unlike their brethren in the old world, immediately adopted the Christian era for their chronological computations; and according to the record, in the four following centuries the wars between them and the heathen Lamanites continued to rage, with great destruction of the Christians, whose populous and civilized cities, which were very numerous throughout North America, were gradually captured and destroyed. In the year 384 the Christians made their final stand on the hill Cumorah, in western New York, where in a great battle 230,000 of them were slain. Moroni, one of the survivors, after wandering a fugitive till A. D. 420, sealed up the golden plates on which all these things were written, and hid them in the hill where they were found by Joseph Smith. One of the books in the collection, the book of Ether, gives an account of an earlier settlement of America than that of Lehi, by a colony from the tower of Babel, soon after the deluge, which was led by Jared, and in time became a great nation, which was destroyed for its sins before the arrival of the colony from Jerusalem. — The religious teachings of the “Book of Mormon” relate in great part to doctrinal questions that were rife in the villages of western New York about 1830. Calvinism, Universalism, Methodism, Millenarianism, Roman Catholicism, and other modern forms of belief, are discussed. Infant baptism is warmly condemned, and polygamy is repeatedly denounced. According to the opponents of Mormonism, from investigations made soon after the appearance of the “Book of Mormon,” the fact is fully established that the real author of the work was Solomon Spalding, who was born in Ashford, Conn., in 1761, graduated at Dartmouth college in 1785, was ordained, and preached for three or four years. Relinquishing the ministry, he engaged in mercantile business at Cherry Valley, N. Y., whence in 1809 he removed to Conneaut, Ohio. In 1812 he removed to Pittsburgh, and thence in 1814 to Amity, Pa., where he died in 1816. He wrote several novels, which he was in the habit of reading to his friends in manuscript, as they were so worthless that he could find no publisher for them, while his poverty prevented him from issuing them at his own expense. During his residence in Ohio in 1810-'12 he wrote a romance to account for the peopling of America by deriving the Indians from the Hebrews, in accordance with a notion then prevalent in some parts of the country that the American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. As early as 1813 this work was announced in the newspapers as forthcoming, and as containing a translation of the “Book of Mormon.” Spalding entitled his book “Manuscript Found,” and intended to publish with it by way of preface or advertisement a fictitious account of its discovery in a cave in Ohio. His widow published a statement in the “Boston Journal,” May 18, 1839, declaring that in 1812 he placed his manuscript in a printing office at Pittsburgh, with which Sidney Rigdon was connected. Rigdon, she says, copied the manuscript; and his possession of a copy was known to all in the printing office, and was often mentioned by himself. Subsequently the original manuscript was returned to the author, who soon after died. His widow preserved it till after the publication of the “Book of Mormon,” when she sent it to Conneaut, where a public meeting, composed in part of persons who remembered Spalding's work, had requested her to send the manuscript that it might be publicly compared with the “Book of Mormon.” She says in conclusion: “I am sure that nothing would grieve my husband more, were he living, than the use which has been made of his wor