Thursday, August 25, 2022

Anthony W. Ivins: Arrival of Columbus to the New World was "a preparatory move towards its redemption"

  

When Columbus sailed out upon the ocean and turned his face toward this land, it was a preparatory move towards its redemption, that it might be opened up again to civilization. The people who had occupied it—the Jaredites, the Nephites, the people of Mulek—had reverted to idolatry. They had turned away from the Lord, and no people in the history of the world that have turned from God our Father and renounced their faith in Him, have ever been perpetuated. But . . . the Lord had said that he would gather scattered Israel together again, and that gathering, or the preparatory work of it, really began in our dispensation when Columbus was led to discover a new world. The same applies to the Pilgrim fathers. (Anthony W. Ivins, Utah Genealogical Magazine, 23:3, January 1932, in Howard H. Barron, Judah, Past and Future: L.D.S. Teachings Concerning God’s Covenant People [Bountiful, Utah: Horizon Publishers and Distributors, 1979], 110)