When I stumble upon Mark Twain quotes about Mormonism...
“The Book of Mormon, engraved upon metal plates, was dug up out of the ground in some out-of-the-way corner of Canada by Joseph Smith, a man of no repute and of no authority, and upon this extravagantly doubtful document the Mormon Church was built, and upon it stands to-day and flourishes…Evidently one of the least difficult things in the world, to-day, is to humbug the human race.”
“The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel — half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast….Whenever he found his speech growing too modern — which was about every sentence or two — he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore,’ ‘and it came to pass,’ etc., and made things satisfactory again. ‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.”
“The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so ‘slow,’ so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.”
