He is the last man — the final survivor of a thousand-year people, who outlived everyone he ever knew and kept writing to strangers he would never meet. He closed the book with a promise that has converted more souls than any sermon in it, and then, fourteen centuries later, he came back to hand it to a boy. Moroni is the loneliest figure in scripture, and the bridge across which the whole record reaches us.
The Man Left Alone
We meet Moroni at the moment everything ends. His father Mormon has fallen at Cumorah with nearly the entire Nephite nation, and Moroni picks up the pen to record the simplest and most desolate fact in the book:
Behold I, Moroni, do finish the record of my father, Mormon. Behold, I have but few things to write, which things I have been commanded by my father. And now it came to pass that after the great and tremendous battle at Cumorah, behold, the Nephites who had escaped … were hunted by the Lamanites, until they were all destroyed. And my father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people. (Mormon 8:1–3)
I even remain alone. A few verses later it gets worse: I have not friends nor whither to go; and how long the Lord will suffer that I may live I know not (Mormon 8:5). Every person he ever loved is dead. His father, his kindred, his entire civilization — gone. He is a hunted man wandering a continent that wants him dead, the single surviving member of a people that once numbered in the millions. There is no lonelier sentence in all of scripture than I even remain alone, and Moroni had to live inside it not for a day but for decades.
Think about what that solitude actually meant. He had no congregation, no family, no nation, no audience. There was no earthly reason left for him to do anything at all — no one to lead, no one to teach, no one to read what he wrote. By every ordinary measure his work was finished and pointless; the people the record was meant to serve were dead in the field. And Moroni kept working anyway, for years, alone, because he had been given a charge and because his faith was fixed on something the destruction of his world could not reach.
What He Did With the Silence
A lesser man would have buried the plates and lain down to die. Moroni did the opposite. In his decades of total isolation, he became one of the most consequential writers in the book.
He finished his father's record and added his own searching words about the latter days (Mormon 8–9). Then — though no one had asked and no one would read it — he took up the ancient Jaredite record that had been waiting since before his people existed, and he abridged the entire book of Ether, the chronicle of that first lost civilization, and threaded through it his own meditation on faith (Ether 12), the great passage about things hoped for and not seen and my grace is sufficient. And then, when even that was done, he kept going, and wrote the small book that bears his own name — the ordinances of the church, the way to administer the sacrament and confer the Spirit, his father's sermon on charity and his father's last epistles, and finally his own farewell. The loneliest man in the record was also one of its most prolific. He filled the silence with scripture.
There is a tenderness in what he chose to preserve in that final book. Alone, with no church left on earth, Moroni carefully wrote down how to run a church — the exact words for baptism, for the sacrament, for ordaining priests (Moroni 2–6). Why would the last man on earth record the order of a church that no longer existed? Because he was not writing for his own dead world. He was writing for a church that did not yet exist, in a future he could see by faith, for people who would one day need to know exactly how. Every page Moroni wrote alone was an act of hope in a congregation thousands of years away.
"I Speak Unto You as if Ye Were Present"
And this is where Moroni becomes almost unbearably personal, because he tells us, plainly, that he could see us. Writing alone in the ruins, he lifts his head and addresses the future reader directly:
Behold, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know your doing. (Mormon 8:35)
Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me. The reason Moroni could keep writing to no one was that, to him, we were not no one. The Lord had shown him the latter-day reader — had let the last lonely Nephite see, across fourteen centuries, the very people who would hold his words in their hands. When you read Moroni, you are reading a man who was looking at you while he wrote, who knew his own generation was ash and that his real audience was still unborn, and who poured his solitude into a letter to the future. His loneliness was real, but it was never quite total, because the One who showed him our faces kept him company in the writing. He was alone with everyone except us — and us he could see.
The Promise That Closes the Book
Moroni's final act as a writer is the one that has done more than any other single passage to bring people to God. At the very end — I make an end of speaking unto you — he leaves not an argument but an invitation, the promise that bears his name:
And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. (Moroni 10:4–5)
It is the perfect ending for the last man. He does not try to compel belief; he cannot — he will be dead before anyone reads a word. So he stakes the whole book on a wager only the reader and God can settle: ask, and you will be told. Moroni hands the entire thousand-year record across the centuries and then steps back and points past himself to the Holy Ghost, who alone can do what no writer can — make a soul know. Millions have taken him up on it. The lonely man's last sentence became the doorway through which most readers of the Book of Mormon have walked into their own witness. He could not preach to his people. He preached to ours, and the sermon was four verses long, and it worked.
And then, his work complete, he laid down the pen in the same peace his Jaredite predecessor Ether had found:
And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah. (Moroni 10:34)
Until my spirit and body shall again reunite. He signs off not in despair but in resurrection hope, promising to meet his future readers at the judgment bar — the man who died with no one beside him, certain he would see us all face to face at the last.
The Witness Who Came Back
But Moroni's story has an ending no other figure in the book is given, and it is the reason he stands as the bridge between the ancient record and our own day. He did not stay in the paradise of God. Fourteen centuries after he sealed up the plates and buried them, Moroni came back — as a resurrected, glorified messenger — and appeared to a fourteen-year-old farm boy named Joseph Smith, and led him to the very record he had hidden, and watched over its coming-forth (Joseph Smith—History 1:30–53). The last man to write in the Book of Mormon became the first angel to deliver it. The witness who buried the book in sorrow returned in glory to place it in the hands of the world.
There is a wholeness to that almost too perfect to be invented. The boy who remained alone to bury his people's record was given, at the last, the joy of carrying it back himself — of being not merely the book's final author but its herald, the one who announced its return. Everything he wrote alone, in faith, to a future he could only see by the Spirit, he lived to see fulfilled: the strangers he addressed became real, the church whose ordinances he recorded was restored, the promise he sealed the book with began converting souls. The loneliest man in scripture got the most companioned ending — handing his life's work, in person, to the dispensation it was written for.
The Son and the Name
One last thread, quiet and human. Moroni was named by his father Mormon, and almost certainly named for someone — for Captain Moroni, the great chief captain of the war chapters, the man Mormon admired so much that he wrote if all men had been like unto Moroni, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever (Alma 48:17). Mormon loved that long-dead general enough to give his name to his own son. And the son grew up to be the last witness of his people and the angel of the Restoration. The name passed from a man who would not delight in bloodshed, through the historian who loved him, to the lonely prophet who carried the whole book to us. It is a small thing, but it ties the record together: the courage of the captain, the love of the abridger, and the solitary faith of the last man, all carried in one name.
He was the last man — every friend, every kinsman, his own father, his entire thousand-year people, dead, and he alone left to write the sad tale. He wandered for decades with no one and nowhere, and he filled the silence with scripture: finishing his father's book, abridging a lost civilization's record, writing down the ordinances of a church that no longer existed, for a church that did not yet exist. He told us plainly that Christ had shown him our faces, so that even alone he was writing to someone. He closed the whole book not with an argument but with a promise — ask God, and the Holy Ghost will tell you — and then signed off in resurrection hope to meet us at the bar of God. And fourteen centuries later he kept the appointment early: the man who buried the record in sorrow came back in glory to hand it to a boy. The loneliest witness in scripture is the one who reaches us most directly, because he is the bridge the whole book crosses to get to us.