These three verses should be considered together to understand that while verse 6 appears to flow out of verse 5, it is actually a transition that leads to verse 8. Verse 8 is an expansion of the ideas in verse 4. Alma has set up a condition in verse 5, and then combined the idea that he should not desire to be an angel with the amplification of the idea that God grants to all nations “all that he seeth fit that they should have.”
This idea that God grants to all nations some portion of his truth is the logical expansion of verse 4’s statement that: “he allotteth unto men, yea, decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable, according to their wills.” In verse 4 the emphasis was on the principle of agency. Here in verse 8 the emphasis is on the mercy of God to give to all men that which they are able to understand.
These truths of God have come to men through several means, and not only through the ordained prophets of God. As Orson F. Whitney notes:
“All down the ages men bearing the authority of the Holy Priesthood—patriarchs, prophets, apostles and others, have officiated in the name of the Lord, doing the things that he required of them; and outside the pale of their activities other good and great men, not bearing the Priesthood, but possessing profundity of thought, great wisdom, and a desire to uplift their fellows, have been sent by the Almighty into many nations, to give them, not the fulness of the Gospel, but that portion of truth that they were able to receive and wisely use. Such men as Confucius, the Chinese philosopher; Zoroaster, the Persian sage; Gautama or Buddha, of the Hindus; Socrates and Plato, of the Greeks; these all had some of the light that is universally diffused, and concerning which we have this day heard. They were servants of the Lord in a lesser sense, and were sent to those pagan or heathen nations to give them the measure of truth that a wise Providence had allotted to them.” (Elder Orson F. Whitney, Conference Report, April 1921, Afternoon Session 33.)