Page 58

2 Mormon asked whether the visitor had read it.

3 The visitor said that the gold was already persuasive.

4 Then Mormon brought an earlier account concerning the brass plates from Jerusalem, which the travelers had sought to preserve the writings they inherited.

5 These were not the same record as the later golden plates, though a hurried caption might place both beneath a single impressive heading.

6 The brass preserved what the travelers had received. The later collection preserved what subsequent keepers had selected and written.

7 Neither metal could examine its own sentence.

8 The visitor asked whether gold was holier than brass.

9 Mormon asked whether the same error would become correct if copied upon a dearer surface.

10 The visitor requested time to consider this beneath less flattering light.

11 Then Moroni came to receive the record of his father.

12 He found questions among the plates and asked whether those also were to be kept.

13 Especially those, said Mormon, for the answers have already acquired many friends.

14 Moroni bound the record, leaving a fastening that did not close around every possible future addition.

15 He did not become Captain Moroni by receiving the name Moroni. The keeper made this distinction before another illustration supplied him with an army.

16 And the reader was invited to notice the words, the hands that selected them, and the work still required after the metal had been admired.

17 For a golden plate may carry a question; it need not be made into the lid of the universe.