Mormon’s tragic description of his people is epitomized in the phrase “the sorrowing of the damned.” The terms damned and dammed do not have the same meaning. Dammed means “blocked, stopped in progress,” as in what a beaver does in building a dam in a river, but the scriptural term damned means “condemned.”
His people were now “past feeling” (1 Nephi 17:45) and had deteriorated to a “fulness of iniquity” (Ether 2:10). Their “day of grace was passed.” When they found themselves beyond the point of repenting and returning to God, it was indeed “everlastingly too late” (Helaman 13:38).
President Spencer W. Kimball labeled this passing of the day of grace as “the tragic point of no return”: “It is true that the great principle of repentance is always available, but for the wicked and rebellious there are serious reservations to this statement. For instance, sin is intensely habit-forming and sometimes moves men to the tragic point of no return. Without repentance there can be no forgiveness, and without forgiveness all the blessings of eternity hang in jeopardy. As the transgressor moves deeper and deeper in his sin, and the error is entrenched more deeply and the will to change is weakened, it becomes increasingly near-hopeless, and he skids down and down until either he does not want to climb back or he has lost the power to do so.”2
The Lord, at this point, would not even “suffer them to take happiness in sin.” The wicked are always agitated deep inside; for them there is no peace. Compare Isaiah 57:20–21, where a simile shows that the wicked—the proud, the critical, the apostate—are like the troubled sea, always agitated, casting up mire and dirt. Peace is not freedom from conflict but a calm assurance of our good standing before God. The wicked cannot feel such assurance.