“This Land… Kept… from the Knowledge of Other Nations”

Joseph F. McConkie, Robert L. Millet
Columbus’s courageous discovery of America at the close of the fifteenth century has compelled the generous and just admiration of the world. The reader of the Book of Mormon is aware that Columbus was directed in his enterprise by the Spirit of God (see 1 Nephi 13:12), as he himself attested. As Columbus was destined in the providence of God to establish the union between the Old and the New worlds, others by that same providence were prohibited from doing so or from making known that they had done so. The heavens have their timetable and it is not for man to hurry the season of harvest.

“Kept As Yet from the Knowledge of Other Nations”

Had the knowledge of the Americas been made known even a century earlier, the religion transplanted to the Western World would have been that of the church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence. The period closing with the fifteenth century was that of the dense darkness that goes before the dawn. Nephi gave us a prophetic description of the status of Christianity in that day and the dominance of a great and abominable church with its obsession for gold, silver, silks, scarlets, fine-twined linen, precious clothing, and harlots (see 1 Nephi 13:4-8; 1 Nephi 14:9-11). Indeed, it was to escape the chains of bondage and the darkness of religious oppression that people of spiritual nobility emigrated to the new land.

Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 1

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