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The Fundamentals tive offices, such as the office of mayor, municipal magistrate, municipal judge, lieutenant-general of the Nauvoo Legion, and the nomination to be president. The Mormon people have allowed themselves to be griev ously deceived by his Autobiography, written in 1838. He tries to make out that when he was fifteen, he was a pious, praying youth, greatly concerned about religion, and especially troubled because there were so many religious sects, he could not tell which one to join. Now let us see what Joseph Smith’s immediate neighbors have to say about his character. There is no lack of evidence. Joseph Smith’s father and mother, with the other children, removed from Vermont to Palmyra, Ontario County, New York, in the summer of 1815. They were fortune-tellers, dreamers, vision-seers. The father was a money-digger, and the son Joseph became famous all through that region as a money-digger. Young Joseph was about eleven years old at this time, having been born in Sharon, Vermont, Dec. 23, 1805. After two or three years they moved about three miles south to Manchester, where they lived up to 1830. Take first the testimony of Pomeroy Tucker, editor of the “Wayne Sen tinel,” at Palmyra, on whose press the first edition of the Book of Mormon was printed. Says Mr. Tucker: “At this period [from 1820 to 1830] in the life and career of Joseph Smith, Jr., or ‘Joe Smith’, as he was universally named, and the Smith family, they were popularly regarded as an illiterate, whisky-drinking, irreligious race of people; the first named, the chief subject of this biography, being unanimously voted the laziest and most worthless of the generation. . . . He could utter the most palpable exaggeration, or marvelous absurdity, with the utmost apparent gravity”. (“Origin, Rise and Progress of Mormonism”, p. 16.) In 1833 sixty-two residents of Palmyra made affidavit, over their own signatures, to the following statements: “We, the undersigned, have been acquainted with the Smith
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