"his sword upon his shelf"

This morning I began reading Ether chapter 14 of the Book of Mormon.  I read the first verse.

"AND now there began to be a great curse upon all the land because of the iniquity of the people, in which, if a man should lay his tool or his sword upon his shelf, or upon the place whither he would keep it, behold, upon the morrow, he could not find it, so great was the curse upon the land."
(Book of Mormon | Ether 14:1)

I lay down tools all the time where I am working and then the next day I can't find it.  I just don't remember where I put it.  After an extensive search I find.  Sometimes I find it after weeks or months when I am not looking for it.   I believe that the above verse is referring to theft.  Someone came into their home during the night and took it.  I did a search on the words in the title of this blog and received many hits.  From the summary of the first hit, I could tell that it was an anti-Mormon.  I didn't go there.  I found a summary that seemed to be from some one that was following the teachings of the Church.

It went through chapter 14 verse by verse quoting from General Authorities of  the church and LDS scholars.  The following statement from  the First Presidency of the Church in the early 1940's which was near the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in which the seventieth anniversary was observed yesterday.

This is an exact quot other than I added the bullets.

“We are not given the step-by-step backsliding of this Jareditic civilization till it reached the social and governmental chaos the record sets out, but those steps seem wholly clear from the results. Put into modern terms, we can understand them. 

• First there was a forsaking of the righteous life, and the working of wickedness; 
• then must have come the extortion and oppression of the poor by the rich;
• then retaliation and reprisal by the poor against the rich; 
• then would come a cry to share the wealth which should belong to all; 
• then the easy belief that society owed every man a living whether he worked or not; 
• then the keeping of a great body of idlers; 
• then when community revenues failed to do this, as they always have failed and always will fail, a self-helping by one to the goods of his neighbor; 
• and finally when the neighbor resisted, as resist he must, or starve with his family, 
• then death to the neighbor and all that belonged to him. 

This was the decreed ‘fulness of iniquity’ (Ether 2:10).” (Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, David O. McKay,Messages of the First Presidency, 6:99 as taken from Latter-day Commentary on the Book of Mormon compiled by K. Douglas Bassett, p. 507-8)"


You can you can give a general date for most of these bullet point.