Some time after the great and last battle at Cumorah, Moroni recorded this letter which he had received from his father, Mormon, some time before, in which his father expressed anew his fears that the end of the Nephites as a distinct people was near at hand. He also told Moroni of a "sore battle" in which he had led the Nephites against the Lamanites, but as in many previous encounters the Lamanites were victorious. Archeantus, Luram, and Emron, together with a great number of the military captains and other "choice men" had been lost to the services of the Republic.
The spirit of the devil had infused into the lives of the Nephite people, hatred for everything that was good and pure. They rebelled against God by refusing to heed the voices of His servants. They knowingly elected to do evil, and chose those things that led them to do wickedly, until now, they loved what they had been taught to hate, and despised that which they should have loved. Instead of having one common enemy, strife and angry passions leavened their lives, and hostility towards each other added a dreadful agony to the death throes of their nation and divided them into contending factions, when there was great need of unity.
In spite of Mormon's oft-repeated attempts to unite the Nephites under one standard in meeting the demands made upon them by both the State and the Church of God, they recoiled when in criticism of them he uttered harsh or sharp words, and responded to every effort he made for their rehabilitation by heaping incense and abuse upon him, often inciting to anger those whom Satan held in his grasp as hostages in the momentous struggle then going on, and which ultimately ended in the extermination of what had, in the past, been a much-favored nation.
Mormon also notes that when in peaceful persuasion, he reprimands his people for their neglect of God, and reminds them of their duty in obeying His laws, they harden their hearts against being ruled by any unseen power, or be controlled by One, the vision of Whom they could not see, and about Whom they had only heard. "Therefore," Mormon says, "I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them." (v. 4)
So intense became the anger of the Nephites towards the servant of the Lord, and so keen and inexhaustible their spite, that the voice of righteousness failed to reach the depths of depravity into which they had fallen. They appeared to Mormon to be insensate to death, he says: "They have lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually." (v. 5)
The magnanimity of Mormon's great heart is seen in his exhortation to his son, not to let the transgressions of their people be a reason for them to relax their efforts. Mormon wanted the reverse. "We have a labor to perform," he told Moroni, therefore, let us labor diligently, "that we may conquer the enemy of all righteousness, and rest our souls in the Kingdom of God." (v. 6)