Remorse, like a gnawing pain, excited by a sense of guilt, mingled with a repentant regret, took possession of each sufferer's conscience. An awareness of his own blameworthiness together with a feeling of obligation that if there was any future, to do only good, collectively lifted them out of the moral depths into which they had plunged, and restored in them the hopes expressed in the prophets' words which they had rejected. "And in one place," the Sacred Record says, "'they were heard to cry, saying: O that we had repented before this great and terrible day, and then would our brethren have been spared, and they would not have been burned in that great City Zarahemla." And still in another place the lamentations of the people, the cries of the fatherless and the widow, the sick and afflicted, mixed with the mournful dirge of the dead or the dying, prompted the awful conclusion: "O that we had repented before this great and terrible day, and not killed the prophets, and cast them out; then would our mothers and our fair daughters, and our children have been spared, and not have been buried up in that great City Moronihah...." (v. 25) Thus there was a continuous round of mourning, weeping, and howling, heard throughout the whole land.