n Hemisphere.--"The eastern
world had lost this knowledge of the Lord earlier than the western
hemisphere. Upon the land of North America, four hundred years after the
birth of our Savior and Master, there stood at least one man who knew
the Lord God Almighty as a distinct personality, a Being capable of
communicating Himself to man. That man was Moroni, the son of Mormon,
whose testimony abides now and must abide through all the ages to
come."--George Q. Cannon, _Life of Joseph Smith_, p. 21. See B. of M.,
Moroni 10:27-34.

2. Results of the Great Apostasy Divinely Overruled for Eventual
Good.--The thoughtful student cannot fail to see in the progress of the
great apostasy and its results the existence of an overruling power
operating toward eventual good, however mysterious its methods. The
heart-rending persecutions to which the saints were subjected in the
early centuries of our era, the anguish, the torture, the bloodshed
incurred in defense of the testimony of Christ, the rise of an apostate
church, blighting the intellect and leading captive the souls of
men--all these dread conditions were foreknown to the Lord. While we
cannot say or believe that such exhibitions of human depravity and
blasphemy of heart were in accordance with the divine will, certainly
God willed to permit full scope to the free agency of man, in the
exercize of which agency some won the martyr's crown, and others filled
the flagon of their iniquity to overflowing. Not less marked is the
divine permission in the revolts and rebellions, in the revolutions and
reformations, that developed in opposition to the darkening influence of
the apostate church. Wickliffe and Huss, Luther and Melanchthon, Zwingli
and Calvin, Henry VIII in his arrogant assumption of priestly authority,
John Knox in Scotland, Roger Williams in America--these and a host of
others builded better than they knew, in that their efforts laid in part
the foundation of the structure of religious freedom and liberty of
conscience--and this in preparation for the restoration of the gospel as
had been divinely predicted.--_The Great Apostasy_, 10:19, 20.

3. Declaration of a General Apostasy by the Church of England.--The
_Book of Homilies_, from which the quotation given in the text is taken,
was published about the middle of the sixteenth century. The official
proclamation of a universal apostasy was made prominently current, for
the Homilies were "appointed to be read in churches