Abstract: The role played by the Holy Ghost is an especially important connecting thread that runs through the Book of Moroni. The book illuminates the various ways in which the Holy Ghost transforms fallen human beings into redeemed members of the kingdom of God. Three phrases — “cleave unto charity,” “possessed of it,” and “that ye may be filled with this love” — are particularly revelatory of the role the Holy Ghost plays in our exaltation. But the positive process illuminated by these phrases has an obverse. Those who reject the Holy Ghost cleave to and are possessed of Satan. They are filled with his hatred. Though his message is primarily positive, Moroni has witnessed and describes what happens to those who reject the influence of the Holy Ghost.

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When he was young, Moroni saw firsthand the unspeakable misery that befalls human beings as their society collapses from the weight of its own wickedness, as its citizens become “a people like this, that are without civilization … a people like this, whose delight is in so much abomination” (Moroni 9:11, 13). Following the total destruction of Nephite society, Moroni lived the final 36 years of his life in extreme isolation and, evidence and common sense suggest, great loneliness.1 During that lengthy period, his companions were the people he found inscribed in the pages he carried with him. As Grant Hardy has shown, his writings were a dialogue with his only available mortal companions [Page 54]— the dead who spoke to him from the dust.2 While Moroni’s mortal companions were those he found inscribed in the pages he carried, the dead were not his only companions. The three Nephites met with him (Mormon 8:10–11), and the Holy Ghost was his constant companion. Brant Gardner suggests that he also saw Joseph Smith in vision and engaged in conversation with him, because Ether 5 is basically “Moroni’s instructions to Joseph Smith.”3

In his isolation, Moroni seems to have developed a deep appreciation for the Holy Ghost and the important roles it plays in mortal and immortal lives. This divine companion and the ways in which it incorporates us in the divine community became a connecting thread that runs through the materials Moroni assembled in the Book of Moroni. Moroni did not write most of the content in his book. What he appears to have done is compile a set of documents handed down to him from his father, Mormon, that were especially meaningful to him as he wandered alone. Those materials feature the Holy Ghost and the progressively larger role it can play in our lives.

The first five chapters of the Book of Moroni4 are all very short, the longest only 153 words. After the first-chapter introduction, each successive chapter focuses on some function of the Holy Ghost that brings us into communion with heaven, allowing us to be possessed by this member of the Godhead and become one with God, Christ,