“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.