| OCR Text |
Show Page 265 merely underscored the need for inspired prophets to give out correct interpretations. Despite the technical character of the debate, the rapt and silent audience increased massively. By the third day, more than eleven thousand 56 listeners had packed the Tabernacle for the two-hour final exchange. Verbatim reports of the proceeding, printed in the Deseret Evening News, came stuttering over the wires to the Eastern newspapers, and the New York Herald reserved them front page copy. The debate had taken on the 57 proportions of "an international drama." When Newman returned to Washington, he was greeted with plaudits - he had devastated the Mormon, he had gained a great rhetorical victory in the fight for enlightened Christianity in Utah. The fact was ignored that no standard commentary, Jewish or Christian, would back him up. Those who knew quietly conceded that Newman's tortured assertions had been hopeless in the face of Orson Pratt's competence in Hebrew. But one Boston newspaper, the Banner of Light, cackled, "Someone carrying more guns than 58 Dr. Newman will have to be sent out missionarying among the 'Mormons.'" From the Mormon perspective, Orson had scored a genuine triumph over the "wise and learned of the world," and, if the outcome of the debate was unclear, there was no question that Orson Pratt had shown himself more 59 than equal to the President's personal spiritual adviser. The world's sunken opinion of Mormonism now had to account for this masterful new defense of an indefensible system. More important, the Pratt-Newman debate lent a certain legitimacy to the spiritual claims of Mormonism - the very fact of the debate had this effect in itself, as Brigham Young had hoped, One modern professor of Hebrew gives the victory to Orson Pratt - he had proved by logical analysis and "massive" comparison of all the syntactic parallels in the Old Testament that Newman's reading was an imposition, not |
