In the opening twenty verses of his speech, Mormon built a foundation on the teachings of the Savior to prepare for the main body of his sermon. He had taught them to be righteous by doing righteous acts, by evaluating decisions by virtue of the light of Christ, and making choices based on the potential for leading them to Christ. Now, he continued by teaching them, as he generalizes this in verse 21, that they should “lay hold on every good thing,” and in verse 22 that “in Christ there should come every good thing.”
That axiom stands at the logical and theological foundation of Mormon’s message, being as fundamental to Mormon’s thinking as Euclid’s first axiom was to his mathematics. The same point was not lost on Moroni. As his father’s protégé, Moroni begins his own final exhortations in his final chapter with a related contrapositive postulate: “And whatsoever thing is good is just and true; wherefore, nothing that is good denieth the Christ, but acknowledgeth that he is” (10:6).
By establishing the foundational proposition that Christ is absolutely essential in all that pertains to “the good,” the stage is then set for Mormon’s first expository lesson, which is about faith in Jesus Christ; and faith will in turn lead, secondly, to and also depend on hope; and the results of hope will, finally, be found in charity, good works, and the pure love of Christ.
While readers usually think of Moroni chapter 7 as Mormon’s great speech about charity, this oration is actually about four topics: “the good,” “faith,” “hope,” and then finally “charity.” Rhetorically, verses 5–28 are saturated with the word “good,” which appears in those verse 26 times! But in verses 29–48, the word “good” never appears.
Starting in verse 21, the word “faith” is blended in and appears a total of 24 times, scattered fairly evenly over verses 21–44.
The word “hope” is then used 10 times, with all (except for the one in verse 3) coming between verses 40–48, while the word “charity” is used only 8 times, all in the final verses 44–47.
In other words, Mormon starts with “good” alone (in verses 5–20), then unites “good” with “faith” (in 21–28), then speaks of “faith” alone (29– 39), then connects “faith” with “hope” (in 40–44), and finishes with a combination of the final two, “hope” and “charity” (44–48). This is an interesting, and well thought out, meditation on the interdependent spiritual movements from good, to faith, to hope, and to charity.
Verse | “Good” (26x) | “Faith” (24x) | “Hope” (10x) | “Charity” (8x) |
5 | 2x | |||
6 | 1x | |||
7 | ||||
8 | ||||
9 | ||||
10 | 2x | |||
11 | 2x | |||
12 | 1x | |||
13 | 2x | |||
14 | 1x | |||
15 | 1x | |||
16 | 2x | |||
17 | 1x | |||
18 | ||||
19 | 2x | |||
20 | 1x | |||
21 | 1x | 1x | ||
22 | 1x | |||
23 | ||||
24 | 3x | |||
25 | 1x | 2x | ||
26 | 1x | 3x | ||
27 | ||||
28 | 1x | 2x | ||
29 | ||||
30 | 1x | |||
31 | ||||
32 | 1x | |||
33 | 1x | |||
34 | 1x | |||
35 | ||||
36 | ||||
37 | 2x | |||
38 | 2x | |||
39 | 2x | |||
40 | 1x | 2x | ||
41 | 1x | 2x | ||
42 | 2x | 2x | ||
43 | 1x | 1x | ||
44 | 1x | 1x | 3x | |
45 | 1x | 1x | ||
46 | 3x | |||
47 | 1x | |||
48 | 1x |
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, “Faith, Hope, and Charity: The ‘Three Principal Rounds’ of the Ladder of Heavenly Ascent,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 59–112.
H. Dean Garrett, “Light in Our Vessels: Faith, Hope, and Charity,” in The Book of Mormon: Fourth Nephi Through Moroni, From Zion to Destruction, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr. (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1995), 81–93.