SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The Mormon Church revealed artifacts of its history in a book featuring a photograph of church founder Joseph Smith's "seer stone."
The egg-shaped stone is included in a newly-published history of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS), and has been seen by few people. Smith used the sacred stone, he claimed, to translate the Book of Mormon, the principal text of the faith. A founding tenet of the faith is that Smith used the stone in the 1820s as he translated the story of Jesus' visit to North America, found on golden plates, from "reformed Egyptian" to English, using spiritual tools which included the stone.