Source:Protestant Sentinel:4 June 1834:Joseph Smith, an illiterate young man, unable to read his own name...was reported to have found several golden plates, together with a pair of spectacles

Protestant Sentinel (1834): "Joseph Smith, an illiterate young man, unable to read his own name...was reported to have found several golden plates, together with a pair of spectacles"

Parent page: Book of Mormon/Translation/Method/Seer stone

Protestant Sentinel (1834): "Joseph Smith, an illiterate young man, unable to read his own name...was reported to have found several golden plates, together with a pair of spectacles"

Protestant Sentinel, 4 June 1834:

In the year 1828, one Joseph Smith, an illiterate young man, unable to read his own name, of Palmyra, Wayne County, New York, was reported to have found several golden plates, together with a pair of spectacles, relics of high antiquity. The spectacles were designed to aid mental vision, under rather peculiar circumstances. They were to be adjusted, and the visage thrust into a close hat. This done Smith could interpret the sacred mysteries of the plates, in which lay, by the hypothesis, in the top of the hat![1]

Notes

  1. “Mormonism,” Protestant Sentinel (Schenectady, New York) n.s. 5/1 (4 June 1834): 4–5. Reprinted from New England Review, ca. May 1834.