Page:A dictionary of the Book of Mormon.pdf/253

Rh the horrors incident to the letting loose of men's most depraved and brutal passions, filled the land. Sometimes one army conquered, sometimes the other. Now it was the Nephites who were pouring their forces into the south; then the Lamanites who were overflowing the north. Whichever side triumphed, that triumph was of short duration, but to all it meant sacrifice, cruelty, bloodshed and woe. At last, when every nerve had been strained for conquest, every man enlisted who could be found, the two vast hosts, with unquenchable hatred and unrelenting obstinacy, met at the hill Cumorah to decide the destiny of half the world. It was the final struggle, which was to end in the extermination of one or both of the races that had conjointly inhabited America for nearly a thousand years (A. C. 385). When the days of that last fearful struggle were ended, all but twenty-four of the Nephite race had been, by the hand of violence, swept into untimely graves, save a few, a very few, who had fled into the south country. Two of that twenty-four were Mormon and his son Moroni, but the latter tells us (A. C. 400) that his father had been killed by the Lamanites, who hunted and slew every solitary fugitive of the house of Nephi that they could find. The horrors of this war are graphically told by Mormon in his second epistle to his son Moroni. Mormon was as great a religious teacher as he was a soldier. His annotations throughout his compilation of the sacred records show this, as do also his instructions and epistles to his son. Shortly before the great final struggle near Cumorah, Mormon hid all the records entrusted to his care in that hill, save the abridged records which he gave to his son Moroni.  MORMON, FOREST OF. The thicket of trees, near the waters of Mormon, in which the persecuted believers in Abinadi's mission and Alma's teachings sought refuge from the 