“O Ye Fair Ones”
Mormon 6:16–22
16 And my soul was rent with anguish, because of the slain of my people, and I cried:
17 O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!
18 Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss.
19 O ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen!
20 But behold, ye are gone, and my sorrows cannot bring your return.
21 And the day soon cometh that your mortal must put on immortality, and these bodies which are now moldering in corruption must soon become incorruptible bodies; and then ye must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, to be judged according to your works; and if it so be that ye are righteous, then are ye blessed with your fathers who have gone before you.
22 O that ye had repented before this great destruction had come upon you. But behold, ye are gone, and the Father, yea, the Eternal Father of heaven, knoweth your state; and he doeth with you according to his justice and mercy.
President Spencer W. Kimball said:
“How his heart must have pained and his whole being ached as Mormon would write: ‘It is by the wicked that the wicked are [destroyed]’ (Mormon 4:5). Then as he saw both armies at Cumorah, in their last bloody struggles, too late to reform, too hardened to repent, too stubborn to change, observing with terror their destroyers marching to the final battlefield where their bodies, too numerous to ever be buried, would rot in the sun: ‘. . . with that awful fear of death which fills the breasts of all the wicked, did they await to receive them’ (Mormon 6:7). . . . There was little else that the wounded general could do now but to weep and to write and to prophesy and warn.”
(“The Lamanite: Their Burden, Our Burden,” BYU Speeches of the Year, Feb. 9, 1967, 5–6.)
