11 Experience on a train and at a funeral

11. Experience on a train and at a funeral Autobigraphy - James H. Oliphant

CHAPTER XI.

I was introduced to a Christian preacher just as I was getting on a train. He was rather overbearing in his turn and looked at me and said, "Predestination." I said, "Yes, the word is in the book and we believe the book." We took the same seat and he read a paper denouncing the doctrine and our people in the strongest terms. It pointed out that the advocates of the doctrine are growing fewer---that education and science drive them as fog before the rising sun; that they are now so few the world will not long be annoyed by them. It was a bitter attack. After he was done he asked what I thought of it. I said, "He argues from our small numbers that we shall soon disappear from the earth. When the world was drowned by the flood only a few were right, and the many were wrong. When Sodom was burned up only a little few were right, and the many were wrong. When the prophet prayed he said, ’I am left alone, and they seek my life.’ So again the few were right, and the many wrong. Now, Elder, tell me when the majority was right." I pressed him to tell me and he could cite no time when the majority was right. "Well," I said, "if those in the right are always the few, you better come over to us."

I was once called to attend a funeral in the country and a lady went along to sing. After we were started, she said, "What do you people believe in?" I said, "We believe in religion." She said, "You believe in predestination, I hear." I told her, "Yes, we believe in that, too." "Well, I don’t see how sensible people can do that," she said.

I asked her if she knew the meaning of the word. She said, "No." "Did you ever study the subject much?" She said, "No." "Well," said I, "you are not prepared to give an intelligent opinion if you do not know the meaning of the word."

She asked, "What does it mean?" I gave her as its meaning, "For one to determine beforehand what he will do." It is one of three ways; you do, and then determine to do; or, you determine to do, and then do; or you do without determining to do, either before or after you do. I asked her which way she did. She said, "I always determine to do first." Well," I said, "you are a Predestinarian, yourself." A Predestinarian is one that believes that God first determines what He will do. If you can find out anything that He does you may know He first determined to do it. If it be to make a world, or save a sinner, or raise the dead, or any other act of God, He first determined to do it. She seemed to be satisfied with this.

If it is good and praiseworthy for God to save a sinner in time, it would certainly be no harm for Him to determine to do so before time, Predestination is essential to all intelligent action. Among men, it is inseparable from intelligence. Persons often denounce it that have never studied it closely. God never does a cruel thing, therefore He never predestinated a cruel thing; He does not predestinate to punish the wicked except for their sins. There is an important distinction between the foreknowledge and the predestination of God. A failure to see this leads to confusion. In 1899, I had a correspondence with Elder S. H. Durand on the subject of predestination. It was first published in our periodicals and afterwards in book form. He urged that all things both good and evil are predestinated. I maintained that "predestinate" denotes causation; that to say that God predestinates all things, both good and evil, is to say that God sustains the same relation to sin that He does to holiness, and this is to make Him the cause of it. I urged that to deny that God is the cause of sin is to deny that He decreed it. We allow that