“No more is it reasonable, but lots of things in the Bible is as lacking in reason, like the sheet that appeared to Peter with beasts.  But about the plates, I’ll tell you just how it was, even though it’s not just the way other folks has got hold of it.  This is the truth, and you can think how hard it was to put it much straighter to folks who didn’t believe in me then as they do now.  The night that the angel came down three times and stood at the foot of my bed, and told me to go and get the plates and where they were to be found, my brain just seemed to go on fire.  I could see things I never saw any other time.  Why, that night I saw through the wooden wall and into the next room, just as if there hadn’t been any boards there, and I saw all the air about me full of motes, just as they are in that sunbeam, and it was dark to other people.  I could hear, too, the cocks crowing and dogs barking for miles round; and when morning came I got up and looked out, and it was as if I had my eyes to a telescope.  I could see the houses for miles and miles.  I ran up the hill and worked into the hole, and there I saw the plates, just as the angel had said.  I’ll never forget to my dying day just what they looked like, and the sort of writing they had.  I took them up and covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid them, and told my folks.  That night I was an awful sick man, and the sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were changed lest any one should see them and die.  And I was to keep them hidden.  I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs; firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry out if I couldn’t get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he believed, and likewise the Whitmers.  And the second proof is that after I had buried the bricks by command, and we was far away from the place where they lay, Martin Harris and Cowdery and David Whitmer saw the plates, the very same as I had told them; they were floating in the air at the time of prayer.”

“But, Mr. Smith, St. Peter saw the sheet in a dream; there isn’t anything in the Bible about things or people floating in the air when people are awake.”

“Well, I don’t know, sister, about that.  There was Philip when he finished baptisin’ the African.  Ye see, in going to Azotus he must have gone up before he went along, or he’d have struck agen the trees; and our brother Newell, not being as good as Philip, and not having as much faith, ye see, he jest began to go and had to come back again.  Mebbe when he’s engaged in the work for a year or two he’ll become an apostle too.  Did ye never think, Sister Halsey, that Providence might take us up, intending to do great things with us, and jest have to set us down because we hadn’t learned to have faith enough?”