Predestination

David McCullough, on the early nineteenth century Calvinist clergyman Lyman Beecher, father of the even more famous Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“But something in him made him shy away from the strictest tenet of his creed — total predestination — and its logic.  Once when he had agreed to to exchange pulpits with another pastor, he was told that the arrangement had been preordained.  ‘Is that so?’ he said.  ‘Then I won’t do it!’  And he didn’t.”

Brave Companions: Portraits in History (New York, 1992), 38