Moroni, righteously indignant, prayed mightily and poured out his soul to God. His display of patriotism and the message of his title of liberty have modern parallel in the words of Francis Scott Key:
Oh, thus be it ever, when free men shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust!’
And the star-spangled banner [as Moroni’s title of liberty] in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”62
“Moroni prayed that the cause of the Christians, and the freedom of the land might be favored.” He labeled the land—north and south—“a chosen land, and the land of liberty.”
The first recorded use of the term Christian in the Old World occurred in the postresurrection period of the apostolic Church in Antioch (Acts 11:26), but the term was used in the New World a century earlier—and we might add that the first Christians, or believers in the Christ who should come, were actually our first parents, Adam and Eve.