“There must have been a good reason for the decision [of the Pioneers] to go on. We know what the reason was. They dared to do what they did, to meet persecution, to meet difficulties, to face death if need be, because they were certain of their belief. There was no doubt about it in their minds. Certainty had removed all hesitation. They knew where they were going – not the identical place, to the Great Salt Lake Valley, where Salt Lake city was to be built – but they knew that God was at the head, that he was leading them to the right place. There was no doubt in their minds about that. They knew that God lives, a God who is anxious to help his children on this earth. They knew the reality of the mission, origin, and ancestry of Jesus Christ. There was no doubt in their minds about the divine mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Doubt and fear had fled. They who had doubts remained behind, but they who lived in the spirit of certainty came along.”
– John A. Widtsoe, April 1946
Some years before 1946 Elder Widtsoe gave my father some valuable advice about moving forward without certainty.
I hadn’t realized that Widtsoe’s rhetoric about knowledge, certainty, and doubt or his generalizations about people he did not know had later gone this far. But on reading both of his talks in April 1946 conference (thanks for pointing me in that direction), I suspect that what he meant by “certainty” was more like what I would have called a “committed faith.” He put his comments on the Pioneers in this context: “History is a dead thing unless used as lessons for us of a later day.” He concluded the first talk in which he spoke of the Pioneers:
“In conclusion, our great need is to learn how to be sure and certain of the things that pertain to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and be courageous in following them. Certainty is but another name for a part of faith. … May we feel just as certain as they did that we in this day of many problems, have the same great destiny—to help build the kingdom of God on earth….”
BTW and apropos of nothing, Elder Widtsoe’s second talk in that conference on use and misuse of the atomic bomb interested me greatly, having a family connection to the Manhattan Project.