On Monday morning I went over to see him. He was a high-strung Predestinarian in his views; believed, or professed to believe, that God had decreed everything that comes to pass. After introducing myself to him, he presently bristled up for an argument. I told him if God had decreed all things, He had decreed that there should be Methodists, and that they should believe precisely as they did, and that they were raised up by the decree of God to torment him before his time, and that he must be a great simpleton to suppose that the Methodists could do or believe anything but what they did; and now, my dear sir, you must be a vile wretch to want to break the decrees of God, and wish to exterminate the Methodists; that if his doctrine was true, the Methodists were as certainly fulfilling the glorious decrees of God, which were founded and truth and righteousness, as the angels around the burning throne; and several admonitions I gave him, and, by the by, he had some feeling on the subject. I talked kindly and prayed with him, and left.
After I left, he began to thing on the topics of conversation, and the more he thought the more his mind became perplexed about these eternal decrees. When he would sit down to eat, or ride, or walk on the road, he would soliloquize on the subject. After cutting off a piece of meat and holding it on his fork, reader to receive it into his mouth, he would say: “God decreed from all eternity that I should eat this meat, but I will break that decree,” and down he would dash it to the gods. As he walked the paths in the settlement and came to a fork, he would say, “God from all eternity decreed that I should take the right-hand path, but I’ll break that decree,” and he would rush to the left. As he rode through the settlement, in coming to a stump or tree, he would reign up his horse and say, “God has from all eternity decreed that I should go to the right of the stump, but I will break that decree,” and would turn his horse to the left.
Thus he went on until his family became alarmed, thinking he was deranged. The little settlement, also, was fearful that he had lost his balance of mind. At length, deep conviction took hold of him; he saw that he was a lost and ruined sinner, without an interest in Jesus Christ. He called the neighbors to come and pray for him, and, after a long and sore conflict with the devil and his decrees, it pleased God to convert him..