Benjamin stresses the “awful view of their own guilt” (3:25) and “lively sense of his own guilt” (2:38). “Shrink from the presence of the Lord” also appears twice (2:38, 3:25). The anguish of the damned is “like an unquenchable fire, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever,” “whose flames are unquenchable, and whose smoke ascendeth up forever and ever” (2:38, 3:27). Both passages describe the demands of justice, under which “mercy hath no claim” (2:38, 3:26). In short, Benjamin is intentionally reprising that earlier text. Why?
Benjamin is concluding a speech unit that began with Mosiah 2:31. The unit is divided into two sections, each dealing with a particular type of spiritual culpability. The first discusses the religio-political “contentions” among his people that he has quelled. While they are a believing people (“I would that ye should do as ye have hitherto done,” 2:31), they might still be enticed by the “evil spirit” (2:33). He who yields to this evil spirit is willfully rebelling against Yahweh and “drinketh damnation to his own soul” (2:33), a phrase repeated in Mosiah 3:25. Benjamin pronounces this religio-political culpability on all “except it be your little children that have not been taught concerning these things” (Mosiah 2:34), a corollary to the innocence of little children in the second part.
The two sections are quite tightly correlated, with the first emphasizing the current political situation, and the second emphasizing the spiritual expansion of that same principle. The first half of the discourse addresses the temporal now while the second half addresses the spiritual forever. The parallelism between the two sections reemphasizes the general principles, while the differences highlight the different temporal and spiritual arenas to which the principles are applied.
Text: This verse ends a chapter in the 1830. The chapter break concludes the first set discourse, which began in our current Mosiah 2.