"And it is many hundred years after the coming of Christ that I deliver these records into the hands of my son." That we may get a better understanding of Mormon's words, let us follow the Nephite people through the events of their last one hundred years. They were a people who had apostatized from the Church of Christ, and who had fallen from the blessed heights of peace, to the bitter depths of unfathomable depravity. Only a short time previously these same people had attained a pinnacle of righteous living that had never before, or since, been reached. For 200 years after the Risen Redeemer ministered to their forefathers in the Land Bountiful, they were bound together by the loftiest ideals of their relationship one to another. They believed that all men were brothers, and that God was the Father of all men. Each sought to do the Savior's bidding, and all walked in the "strait and narrow path" which leads to Eternal Life. It is written in their sacred record that not one of them was lost. They were a happy, holy people; angels descended to minister to their wants, and revelations from heaven were their constant guide. Now, all was changed. The conditions under which they lived were completely reversed. The things they once hated, they now loved. What once they loved, they now despised. Instead of peace, there was war. Instead of brotherly love, there was hatred. Wickedness and abandonment to the meanest purposes of diseased and depraved hearts usurped the place of goodness and purity. Crime, degradation, and filth speeded the course of them who rushed headlong into destruction. Truly, we can see that the Lord, because of their wickedness, had forsaken them. They were left almost alone.
In the year A.D. 335, or in the 935th year of the Nephite annals, Mormon obtained the plates as Ammaron had directed. Forty years later he removed them all from the Hill Shim to prevent their destruction by marauding bands of Lamanites. Ten years later Mormon recorded:
"... having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were sacred, to fall into the hands of the Lamanites, (for the Lamanites would destroy them) therefore I made this record out of the plates of Nephi, and hid up in the Hill Cumorah all the records which have been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord, save it were these few plates which I give to my son Moroni. (Morm. 6:6)
The year A.D. 322, saw actual warfare break out between the Nephites and the Lamanites for the first time since the Risen Redeemer's appearing among them. A number of battles were fought in which the armies of the Nephites were victorious. These Nephite successes ended, for a while, the awful bloodshed that is incident to open warfare, but in four years the savage contest was renewed. In the interim, iniquity had greatly increased.
When the warring began again, the youthful Mormon, only fifteen years of age, was appointed to lead the Nephite armies. In the following two years, disaster after disaster followed the cause for which he led them, and by A.D. 329, rapine, revolution, and carnage, prevailed throughout all the land. For many years warfare continued; first the Nephites overwhelmed their enemy, and then the Lamanites were successful in routing the Nephites, until, at length, both armies were near exhaustion.
This resulted in a treaty of peace with the Nephites as one party, and the Lamanites and Gadianton Robbers as the other. The provisions of this treaty, which proved to be only a temporary cessation of hostilities, were that the Nephites possessed the country north of the Isthmus, and the Lamanites, the regions south. A peace of ten years followed this treaty. In A.D. 360, the Lamanites, through their king, again declared war. Again the land was the scene of widespread conflict. For more than twenty years, combat, contention, rapine, pillage, and all the horrors of corrupt and brutal passions filled the entire countryside, which seemed to be centered in the Land Desolation, until the Lamanites drove the Nephites far to the North.
This state of things grew increasingly worse, until, at last, when every nerve had been strained for conquest, and every man who could be found was enlisted, the two vast hosts, with unquenchable hatred and unrelenting obstinacy, met at the Hill Cumorah to decide the destiny of half the world. It was the final struggle which was to end in the extermination of one, or both of the races that for nearly a thousand years had conjointly inhabited America. When the days of that final struggle were ended all but twenty-four of the Nephite army had been swept into untimely graves. A few Nephites fled to the land southward. Two of the twenty-four were Mormon, and his son, Moroni, who later tells us, (A.D. 400) that his father had been killed by the Lamanites who hunted and slew every member of the House of Nephi they could find.
Mormon was equally as great a religious teacher as he was a soldier. His annotations throughout his compilation of the Sacred Record show this, as do also his instructions and epistles to his son. Shortly before the great and final struggle near the Hill Cumorah, Mormon hid all the plates, or records, entrusted to his care there, save the abridged account of the Larger Plates of Nephi, which he gave to his son, Moroni. Mormon ends his statement regarding the horrors of the then continuing war with a prayer that his son may survive the ferocity of its carnage, and live to write the last chapter of his people's history, and, also to testify, therein, to them of Christ. We may understand, somewhat, Mormon's great character, and his stellar faith and integrity, by the power of his writings. Forgiveness of his apostate people's backsliding, and a desire to aid in their future welfare, was the prayer that filled his heart. He saw their fallen condition in the future, but his faith, upheld and sustained by his own righteousness, is expressed in the hope that what Moroni will write "some day it may profit them." Today, centuries later, we see, with ever-increasing clarity, the answer to Mormon's praying. The descendants of these same people are, today, beginning to obey the voice of Israel's Shepherd, and are coming into His fold. And we ask, "Why not?" when we remember that they, too, are of Israel.