IN DEFENSE OF THE FAITH
The
Truth About Seventh-day Adventists
A
REPLY TO CANRIGHT
by
William
H. Branson
15. WHO ARE THE SEVENTH-DAY
ADVENTISTS?
SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS
date the origin of their movement from the years 1844-50. Many
of the original
founders of the Seventh-day Adventist faith were former associates of
William Miller (a lay
Baptist preacher) and
many others who, previous to 1844, with great earnestness proclaimed the
approaching Second
Advent of the Lord to the earth. These people, who represented many
Protestant
denominations, were
known as Adventists because of their faith in the imminence of the
personal return of
Jesus, and their
message resounded throughout the world and claimed converts from many
nations. This
message produced a
great religious awakening such as had not been witnessed since the
Reformation of the
sixteenth century.
Expectation of the
coming of Christ about the year 1844 was built on a study of certain
Bible
prophecies containing
the time element. In the exposition of such prophecies the generally
accepted rule of
interpretation was, and
still is, a day for a year, according to Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6.
The particular prophecy
which led Mr. Miller and his associates to set a date for the Second
Advent was Daniel 8:14,
which declares, in part: Unto two thousand and three hundred days;
then shall
the sanctuary be
cleansed.
As pointed out in the
previous chapter, Daniel 9:24, 25 furnished an event from which to count
these day-years, in the
words: From the going forth of the commandment to restore and to
build
Jerusalem. This
command, or decree, went forth in 457 BC. (See Ezra 6:14.)
Knowing that the earth,
once destroyed and purged by water, is, according to 2 Peter 3:6, 7, to
be
again destroyed and
purged, this time by fire, and mistakenly supposing the earth to be the
sanctuary of
Daniel 8:14, it was
only natural for the Advent believers of that day to conclude that the
end would come at
the expiration of the
2300 days, which time period ended in the autumn of 1844, on the
twenty-second day
of October.
Profoundly convinced
that the world was about to witness the glory of its descending Lord,
and
that all men, rich and
poor, were to be summoned before the great white throne, there to face
the judge and
to hear His sentence
pronounced upon them, Miller and his associates raised throughout all
Christendom
the solemn cry,
'Prepare to meet thy God. Their message rang like a trumpet call
throughout the world.
This produced a great
religious awakening, and people everywhere turned to God and repented of
their
sins.
This movement extended
from 1833 to 1844. In America the message was proclaimed by some
three hundred ministers
belonging to many different denominations. In Great Britain some seven
hundred
Church of England
clergymen took up the cry.
Books and charts on the
Second Advent were distributed intensively in Norway, and literature on
the Second Advent was
sent to most of the mission stations in heathen lands.
Dr. Joseph Wolff, a
noted itinerant missionary, down to the year 1845, proclaimed the,
Lord's speedy
Advent in Palestine,
Egypt, on the shores of the Red Sea, Mesopotamia, the Crimea, Persia,
Georgia,
throughout the Ottoman
Empire, in Greece, Arabia, Turkey, Bokhara, Afghanistan, Cashmere,
Hindostan,
Tibet, in Holland,
Scotland, Ireland, at Constantinople, Jerusalem, St. Helena, also on
shipboard in the
Mediterranean, and in
New York City to all denominations. He declares that he has preached
among Jews,
Turks, Mohammedans,
Parsees, Hindus, Chaldeans, Yesedes, Syrians, Sabaeans, to Pashas,
sheiks, shahs,
the kings of Organtsh
and Bokhara, the queen of Greece, etc. Voice of the Church, p. 343;
cited in The
Great Second Advent
Movement, by J. N. LOUGHBOROUGH, p. 101.
Everywhere the burden
of the message given was, Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the
hour ' of His
judgment is come.
Revelation 14:7. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, adherents of the
Church of
England, and people of
many other persuasions joined the movement, and helped to swell the cry.
Most of
these people, however,
retained their membership in the churches to which they had always
belonged. Mr.
Miller's preaching of
this doctrine apparently did not disqualify him for membership in the
Baptist Church,
for his biographer
states:
In 1833 Miller
received a license to preach from the Baptist Church, of which he was a
member. A large
number of ministers of
his denomination also approved his work, and it was with their formal
sanction that
he continued his labors.
He continued in the
Baptist Church until his death. Mr. Miller had the date figured out
correctly. No one
from that time to this
has ever been able to refute the accuracy of his reckoning. But he was
clearly
mistaken regarding the
event, that was to take place. The Miller Adventists thought that the
sanctuary
spoken of in the
prophecy, and which was to be cleansed, was this sin-defiled earth. They
saw from other
scriptures that when
the earth is finally purified, its purification will be accomplished by
fire, and that this
cleansing work will be
connected with the appearing of our Lord. They concluded, therefore,
that if the
time for cleansing the
sanctuary was to begin in 1844, it must be that the Lord would return at
that time and
save His people out of
the world before the cleansing of fire began.
Their failure,
therefore, lay in a wrong view of what the sanctuary was. They did not,
at that time,
understand the types
and antitypes of the Old Testament, as men have come to understand them
since. They
did not grasp the
thought of a heavenly sanctuary, of the true tabernacle, which the
Lord pitched, and not
man (Hebrews 8:2),
and of which Jesus, our High Priest, is minister. They did not see that
in heaven there
was to be a work of
judgment, the antitype of the Day of Atonement solemnized in ancient
Israel once each
year (Leviticus 16),
and that this judgment, mentioned in Daniel 7:9, 10, must be completed
before the
Lord's return to earth;
for at that time the destiny of all will have been decided, and Jesus
will bring His
rewards with Him, to
give every man according as his work shall be. Revelation 22:12.
When the twenty-second
day of October of that year passed without bringing the end 'Of all
things
earthly, those who had
confidently looked for the return of their Lord were thrown into great
perplexity.
Some entirely gave up
their faith in the Second Advent. Others sought to establish some other
date for the
realization of their
hopes.
Others, and among them
was Mr. Miller himself, thought that for some unaccountable reason the
Advent was simply
delayed, and might occur any day. To Joshua V. Himes, a devout clergyman
of the
Protestant Episcopal
Church, and a faithful fellow in heralding the Advent near, Mr. Miller
wrote:
We have done our
work in 'warning sinners, and in trying to awake a formal church. God in
His
providence has shut the
door; we can only stir one another up to be patient, and be diligent to
make our
calling and election
sure. Advent Herald, Dec. 11, 1844.
DISCOVERING MILLER'S MISTAKE
But some of these
earnest Christians who had been disappointed, instead of seeking
readjustment of time,
or simply waiting,
began a diligent study of the Scriptures, and shortly found that the
earth is not the
sanctuary of Daniel
8:14, and that the prophecy foretold, not the cleansing of the earth by
fire in the year
1844, but the beginning
of the closing work of our great High Priest, Jesus Christ, in the true
sanctuary in
heaven, and that Christ
could not come until the completion of that work.
They came to see
clearly that the sanctuary whose cleansing was to begin in 1844, at the
close of
the 2300 years of
Daniel 8:14, was the sanctuary of God in heaven and not the earth, and
that its cleansing
involved the work of
the investigative judgment, which was to take place immediately
preceding our Lord's
return, of which we
have spoken more specifically in a previous chapter.
It was in this same
year (1844) that a number of Adventist believers began the observance of
the
seventh-day Sabbath,
and thus became in fact Seventh-day Adventists, although this name was
not formally
adopted until 1860. We
do not suggest, however, that the doctrines held by the Seventh-day
Adventists are
new. Quite to the
contrary; they have been held through past ages by both patriarchs and
prophets, whose
faith in them has been
fittingly recorded in the Holy Scriptures.
Enoch, the seventh from
Adam, prophesied of the Second Advent of Christ, and was among those
who recognized the
binding claims of the law of God and the seventh-day Sabbath. Abraham
was another,
Moses was another, and
the prophets and apostles were others. Even Jesus our Lord, during His
earthly life,
both taught and
practiced these doctrines. But these truths had been largely lost sight
of in the apostasy of
the early centuries and
the Dark Ages, and it became necessary to raise up a people to set them
again in
their proper light
before the world that was about to meet an offended Lord over His broken
law.
The acceptance of the
Scriptural doctrine that the sanctuary is in heaven, opened an entirely
new
field to the vision of
these Advent believers. They saw that there was an essential and solemn
work to be
wrought by our great
High Priest in the most holy apartment of the heavenly temple before He
could come
to earth, and that
during the same time a work of great magnitude and importance must be
accomplished by
the church upon the
earth. They read in an entirely new light the striking prophecy of
Revelation 11:19:
The temple of God
was opened in heaven, and there was seen in His temple the ark of His
testament.
They remembered that
the ark was kept only in the most holy place of the earthly sanctuary,
and
that that apartment was
opened only when the high priest went in on the tenth day of the seventh
month to
make final atonement
before the ark to cleanse the sanctuary and the people. Here they saw
the same work
revealed in heaven.
Here, then, was the cleansing of the sanctuary which was to begin at the
end of the
2300 days in 1844.
They now received a new
view of the law of God, since its position in the antitypical sanctuary
or
temple in heaven was
found to be exactly the same as was its position in the typical
sanctuary upon earth,
thus utterly and
forever precluding the idea of any change in that law through all the
intervening ages. It
must read in the ark in
heaven just exactly as it read in the ark upon earth. Vividly there came
now to their
minds the words of
Jesus when He said, One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from
the law (Matthew
5:18) ; and remembering
that the law emphatically declares that the seventh day is the
Sabbath of the Lord
thy God: in it thou
shall not do any work (Exodus 20:8-11), they recognized that
Christians are under
obligation to keep this
original Sabbath of the fourth commandment.
For some time the
burden of those who had become Seventh day Adventists by embracing the
Bible Sabbath was for
the scattered flock, or in other words, for those who had accepted
the message of
the Second Advent as
preached by William Miller and some three hundred other ministers in
this country,
of nearly all the
orthodox denominations.
They later, however,
came to see that before Christ's coming a great reform message must go
to
the world, warning men
of the approaching day of God, and urging them to make full preparation
for it by
repentance of sin and
belief of the gospel. They further saw that this reform message would be
similar to
the work of Elijah, and
would call men everywhere to the keeping of the commandments of God as
revealed in the Ten
Commandments, or Ten Commandments, including the fourth commandment,
which
clearly enjoins the
observance of the seventh day of the week (Saturday) as the holy
Sabbath; that while
righteousness comes
only through faith in the atonement made by our Lord Jesus Christ, yet
that faith does
not make void the law
of Jehovah, nor free Christians from obligation to keep it.
Being profoundly
convinced that these things were true, the few Seventh-day Adventist
believers,
after several years'
study and adjustment, began to plan for the dissemination of what to
them was a
message of great
importance and urgency. They concluded that the message of the soon
coming of Christ
and the warning to
prepare for that momentous event must be world wide in its application,
and since no
other branch of the
Christian church seemed to feel any particular burden to give it, they
decided that it was
incumbent upon them to
carry it to the entire world, and this is what they then set out to do.
Their
convictions in this
matter were based upon such texts of Scripture as the following:
Behold, I will send
My messenger, and He shall prepare the way before Me; and the Lord, whom
you
seek, shall suddenly
come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, whom you delight
in:
behold, He shall come,
says the Lord of hosts. Malachi 3:1.
This gospel of the
kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all
nations; and then shall
the end come.
Matthew 24:14.
Blow you the trumpet
in Zion, and sound an alarm in My Holy mountain: let all the inhabitants
of the land
tremble: for the day of
the Lord comes, for it is nigh at hand. Joel 2:11.
Sanctify you a fast,
call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the
land into the
house of the Lord your
God, and cry unto the Lord, Alas for the day! For the day of the Lord is
at hand, and
as a destruction from
the Almighty shall it come. Joel 1:14,15.
I saw another angel
fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto
them that
dwell on the earth, and
to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, saying with a loud
voice, Fear
God, and give glory to
Him; for the hour of His judgment is come: and worship Him that made
heaven, and
earth, and the sea, and
the fountains of waters. Revelation 14:6, 7.
As already indicated,
Seventh-day Adventists believe these scriptures clearly teach that just
before Jesus
comes, He will raise up
messengers to prepare the way before Him, as John the Baptist was raised
up to
prepare the way for the
first advent of Jesus. This preparatory message must be world wide in
extent, going
to every nation, and
kindred, and tongue, and people. It is a warning message, and is
reformatory in its
nature; and as John the
revelator wrote of it, he clearly indicated that it would result in
gathering out of the
nations a people of
whom it is said, Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and
the faith of
Jesus. Revelation
14:12.
TIME SETTERS?
One of the charges
urged by Mr. Canright against the Seventh-day Adventists is that they
are time setters.
He says of them:
They set the time
for the end of the world in 1843, and failed. They set it again in 1844,
and failed. -
Seventh-day Adventism
Renounced, p. 79.
We submit that this
constitutes a gross misrepresentation. We have no disposition whatsoever
to cover up
the fact that some who
later became Seventh-day Adventists were in the Miller movement and
believed and
preached that the end
of the world would come in 1844, yet as Mr. Canright well knew, the
Seventh-day
Adventist movement,
which arose subsequently to the 1844 disappointment, has held as one of
its basic
beliefs from the very
outset an interpretation of prophecy that shut out the possibility of
setting a time for
our Lord's return and
the end of the world. We refer to the interpretation given by
Seventh-day Adventists
to the prophecy of the
2300 days of the eighth and ninth chapters of Daniel.
Seventh-day Adventism
as a distinctive movement., was not launched until after the
disappointment of
Miller and his
followers in 1844, and therefore this church cannot rightly be charged
with the 1844 mistake.
We would remind the
reader that Mr. Canright renounced Seventh-day Adventism, and not
merely
Adventism in
general, which includes many sects and beliefs. Certain Adventist bodies
have set times for
the Lord to return, but
the Seventh-day Adventists as a body have never done so.
Mr. Canright knew that
he was writing his book against a denomination which had its rise
subsequent to the
disappointment of 1844, and yet he boldly declares that they set the
time for the end of
the world in 1843, and
failed. They set it again in 1844, and failed.
He challenges
Seventh-day Adventists on their denominational view of the heavenly
sanctuary,
which absolutely
precludes time setting, and yet says that they are the time setters, and
believe that the
earth is the sanctuary.
The very first statement in Mr. Canright's book is, half truth and half
error, and is
therefore calculated to
deceive. This appears on page 25, chapter 1, paragraph 1, and in it he
says.
Seventh-day
Adventism originated about fifty years ago in the work of Mr. Miller,
who set the time for
the end of the world in
1843-44.
This opening statement
is intended, of course, to brand Seventh-day Adventists as fanatical
time setters,
and thus immediately to
create prejudice against them and their teachings. Again on page 76 of
his book we
read:
Miller is
responsible for all the time setting done by the Adventists since his
time, because they are the
legitimate outgrowth of
his work. He began setting time. He did it the second time. He taught
them how to
do it. He fathered the
idea. He inculcated it in all his followers. They then simply took up
and carried on
what he had begun.
This is a gross
misrepresentation of the work and teachings of Seventh-day Adventists,
as anyone who had preached for
them for twenty-eight years, as had Mr. Canright, would well know. These
statements would
indicate that William Miller, who set the time for the return of our
Lord in 1844, was the
founder of the Seventh
day Adventist Church; that Miller and the Seventh-day Adventists
believed and
taught the same thing;
in fact, that it was all one movement, Millerism and Seventh-day
Adventism being
one and the same thing.
No other impression could be received from these words of Mr. Canright,
They. . .
took up and carried on
what he had begun, in the matter of time setting.
Now let the reader note
how quickly Mr. Canright's fertile mind could change from one side of an
argument to another
when it served his purpose to do so. A little farther on in his book,
where he tries to
show how very unpopular
Seventh-day Adventists were when their work first started, he speaks of
the
opposition they had
from William Miller, this very man who, in his first chapter, he sets
forth as the
founder of the
Seventh-day Adventist Church.
He [Miller]
especially points out the Seventh-day Adventist positions as utterly
wrong. He knew
all about their
arguments on the three messages, the sanctuary, the Sabbath, etc., and
yet he not only
rejected them, but
earnestly warned his people against them. . . . Not a leading man in
Miller's work ever
embraced the views of
the Seventh-day Adventists.- Seventh-day Adventism Renounced, p. 78.
Now, it would be
utterly impossible to harmonize these two statements of Mr. Canright's
regarding Miller and
his relation to the Seventh-day Adventist movement. In the one Miller is
made
responsible for what
Seventh day Adventists have done, and in the second he as plainly
declares that Miller
rejected the teaching
of Seventh-day Adventists and warned his people against them, and that
not a leading
man in Miller's work
ever embraced the views of the Seventh-day Adventists. Could two
statements
possibly be more
conflicting?
The Miller movement, as
such, ended with the passing of the time, October 22, 1844, before the
Seventh-day Adventist
Church was founded. It is true, also, as stated by Mr. Canright, that
Mr. Miller, who
was still living at the
time the work of Seventh-day Adventists began, refused to accept their
teachings, and
continued on as a
member of the Baptist Church till his death.
Except-the doctrine of
the imminence of the personal and literal Advent of our Lord, there was
practically nothing
held in common by the Adventists of Miller's movement and the
Seventh-day
Adventists, who, as
such, came upon the stage of action after the disappointment. The
Seventh-day
Adventists believe that
the dates worked out. by Miller for the cleansing of the sanctuary in
1844 were
correct, but they
recognize that he was mistaken as to the event which was to take place
on that date. Mr.
Miller believed that
the sanctuary was the earth; Seventh day Adventists believe it is the
place where Christ
ministers as High
Priest in heaven.
In common with most
other Baptists, Mr. Miller observed Sunday, the first day of the week,
as the
Sabbath; the
Seventh-day Adventists hold that the seventh day should be kept
according to the fourth
command of the Ten
Commandments.
We understand that Mr.
Miller believed in the natural immortality of the soul, and that people
go
to their reward at
death; Seventh-day Adventists believe that man is mortal, that the dead
are asleep,
unconscious, and that
they will not receive their rewards until after the judgment and the
resurrection of the
dead.
As already pointed out,
a number of those who were associated with Mr. Miller in his work were
among those who later
became Seventh-day Adventists. But that fact does not make the
Seventh-day
Adventist Church
responsible for Mr. Miller's unscriptural views.
If, therefore, Mr.
Miller and his followers were not Seventh day Adventists, but were
Baptists,
Methodists, etc., who
believed in the Second Advent, how can it be truthfully said that
Seventh-day
Adventists are time
setters simply because Mr. Miller set the time for the Lord to come? Why
not say that
the Baptists are time
setters, seeing that Mr. Miller was a Baptist and not a Seventh day
Adventist? Why
should Mr. Canright, a
Baptist preacher, try to confuse the issue by shifting the
responsibility of time
setting from members of
his church to the Seventh-day Adventist Church? There could be only one reason to
create prejudice
against that church.
Seventh-day Adventists
do believe that our Lord will return in person to this earth, in harmony
with His definite
promise recorded in John 14:1-3 and Acts 1:9-11. They also believe that
the prophetic
portions of the
Scriptures clearly point to the fact that His coming is near, 4~ even at
the doors. Matthew
24:33. They are
attempting, by the grace of God, to prepare their hearts and lives for
that great day, and
believe they should
embrace every opportunity to encourage others to do likewise; but never
has the
Seventh-day Adventist
denomination fixed a date for our Lord's return.
Mr. Canright says on
page 75 of his work that Elder James White, who became a strong leader
in
the Seventh day
Adventist Church, was associated with Mr. Miller, and engaged in
preaching a definite
time for the Lord to
come. Of course this is true. Elder James White was in the Miller
movement, and
ardently believed in
Miller's teachings. But it should be understood that Elder White was
then a member of
the Christian Church.
He had not yet become a Seventh-day Adventist.
That some lone
individual or minister who became a Seventh day Adventist should have
clung for
a little period to the
idea of time setting would be expected in the very nature of the case.
And the citing of
some such individual is
no valid indictment of the denomination.
But there is no need
that we make further answer to this time setting charge, for Mr.
Canright
himself, in his book
The Lords Day, which he wrote subsequently to his Seventh-day Adventism
Renounced, makes this
sweeping admission:
To their credit it
should be said that Seventh-day Adventists do not believe in setting
time definitely since
1844' -The Lords Day,
p. 38.
Now, since there were
no Seventh-day Adventists before the end of 1844, and since, as Mr.
Canright
admits, they do not
believe in setting time definitely since 1844, we submit that they
are not time setters
at all.
BEGAN A WORLD ENDEAVOR
It seemed presumptuous
for so small a group of people as the Seventh-day Adventists were in the
early years of their
movement, to undertake a world endeavor. There were only a few of them
at first, and
for sixteen years they
had no church organization, no buildings, no institutions, practically
no literature, and
but little money. But
they had a growing conviction that they had discovered in the Holy
Scriptures light
and truth which must be
given to the world, and with undaunted courage born of faith in God,
they began
the work.
The first tracts by
Sabbath-keeping Adventists were published in 1846; and in 1849 a
periodical
entitled The Present
Truth was started. The first general meeting to be held by them was
called at Rocky
Hill, Connecticut, in
1848. This was before they fully realized what was involved in giving a
world-wide
message. The name
Seventh-day Adventist was adopted in 1860, but it was not until 1861
that their first
churches were formally
organized. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists was
organized two
years later, with
delegates present from six State conferences, which had been previously
organized.
In 1874 missionaries
began to go out to other countries, and the work soon became established
in
every continent of the
world, from which it quickly spread to adjacent island fields, and in
all those lands
converts began to
appear and churches were established. Paralleling this spread of
missionary endeavor was
a steady growth of
institutional work. Publishing houses were established, scores of
periodicals and
hundreds of books and
tracts began to be printed; schools and colleges were built for the
purpose of
educating and training
gospel workers who could go everywhere with the message; and sanitariums
and
hospitals were founded
for the relief of the sick and suffering, these being operated entirely
by Christian
physicians and nurses.
In seeking to bring their patients under the influence of the gospel,
they furnished
balm to both body and
soul.
Taking a retrospective
view of this movement during the eighty-nine years since it had its
first
feeble beginnings, we
find that its development has been very remarkable, to say the least. In
some
countries Seventh-day
Adventist membership has been doubling every four or five years, and
today there is
scarcely a land on
earth where their work is not established or into which their missions
are not being
projected.
From the very character
of their message, it is only natural that their appeal is to all men
alike.
They preach to Jew,
Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist, heathen anybody anywhere who will pause
to
hear. Thousands of
their converts have been made direct from heathenism, and we believe
that their
mission stations may be
found today in more of the heathen tribes of the world than those of any
other
Protestant church.
At the close of 1945
they had a total of 14,874 evangelical laborers, 69 union conferences,
137
state and provincial
conferences, and 197 organized mission fields.
They were operating 52
publishing houses and branches, publishing literature in nearly 200
languages, and
distributing the product of their presses throughout the world to the
value of nearly
$10,000,000 annually.
The total sales of literature during the eighty-two years since their
first paper was
established amounts to
$161,748,519.50.
They were conducting
3,189 primary schools and 269 institutions of intermediate grades and
higher learning. Of the
latter, one is an A-grade medical college, one a theological seminary
granting the
Master's degree, and
eleven are baccalaureate colleges granting the Bachelor of Arts and
Bachelor of
Science degrees. The
total student enrollment in primary, intermediate, and college grades is
approximately
150,000.
Sixty-two Seventh-day
Adventist medical institutions are in operation, employing 256
physicians
and 5,757 nurses and
other helpers. The total investment in all these educational and medical
institutions is
$118,565,591.70.
Not a dollar of
earnings from any institution operated by them accrues to any
individual, but any
gains made from year to
year are either used to extend the work of the respective institutions
or are
appropriated to the
mission treasury to be used in the extension of the work in other lands.
The ministers of the
church are supported by tithe paid voluntarily by the church membership,
and
the mission work in
foreign lands is supported by additional freewill offerings. These
offerings to foreign
missions now total
nearly $8,000,000 annually.
The membership,
comparatively speaking, is not large. In the very nature of the case
this is to be
expected. The
acceptance of the Seventh-day Adventist faith entails a great sacrifice
in every land,
particularly in
civilized countries. The keeping of the seventh-day Sabbath and the non
use of tobacco and
all alcoholic liquors
are points that bring a real test to all would be adherents. But that
which has astonished
multitudes in the
religious world is the fact that only a few hundred thousand people
should be able, under
God, to maintain such
an extensive work, embracing every great country of the entire globe,
besides many
smaller ones.
When Mr. Canright
separated from the Seventh-day Adventist communion and published his
dumb founder in
1889, he predicted an early failure of the entire movement. Speaking of
the efforts of
the Seventh-day
Adventists to extend and support their work, he said:
It is doubtful how
long they can maintain this strain without a crash. Seventh-day
Adventism Renounced,
p. 27.
On page 26 of his work
he gives statistics to show the extent to which the work of the
Seventh-day
Adventists had grown at
that time. Here he says:
In 1888 they had 400
ordained ministers and licentiates, 901 churches, 21,112 members, 31
conferences,
and five missions.
He further states that
they sold that year $90,000 worth of books, were issuing twenty-six
periodicals in
different language, had seven publishing houses, three sanitariums,
two colleges, one
academy, and several
smaller schools, with sixty-two teachers and 1,000 students. He pictures
these
institutions as being
hopelessly in debt, and says the efforts made to meet these debts had
drained the
pockets of many of
their people and discouraged others. It was then that he predicted the
crash.
But that was many years
ago, and the crash has not come. During this time their work has
increased in every
land; the number of evangelical workers has multiplied more than thirty
five times; their
conference and mission
field organizations, about eleven times; their principal institutions
have increased
from 13 to 510; their
annual student enrollment has grown from 1,000 to 148,144. Membership
gains have
been made every year.
The total funds
contributed annually for religious work have increased from something
like
$200,000 in 1888 to
$31,540,935.24 in 1945. At the time Mr. Canright wrote, It is
doubtful how long they
can maintain this
strain without a crash, the per capita giving was about $8 per annum.
This had increased
to $54.72 in 1945, and,
strange to say, the crash seems as far off today as it did when Mr.
Canright wrote
his book.
In fact, if
the writer is any judge of humanity, it would be hard to find a happier
and more
contented people on the
earth than are these Seventh-day Adventists, who are thus contributing
more
liberally per capita
than any other people in the whole world to the support of the gospel
work.
The General Conference
sessions of the denomination draw representatives from all over the
world. Chinese,
Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Africans, South Sea Islanders, Egyptians,
South American
Indians, Mexicans,
Europeans - all mingle with their American and Canadian brethren in a
fellowship that
is expressed in joyful
countenances as they tell of the advance of the last gospel message to
the far corners
of the earth. The
blessed hope of the soon coming of the Lord to put an end to sin
and suffering buoys
them up in the face of
adversity and discouragement. But there are so many evidences of the
providential
leading of God in every
feature of their work that every setback and Satanic opposition is
matched by
overruling
circumstances that only encourage them to redouble their zeal for the
finishing of their world
task.
That Seventh-day
Adventists are not unappreciated in other church communions is in
evidence
from the following
excerpt taken from a sermon preached by the pastor of the Tenth Avenue
Baptist
church. as a broadcast
some time ago over Station KTAB:
Seventh-day
Adventists have become accepted members of the community. Their little
churches are
nestled among the hills
and the valleys. Their hospitals bring welcome ministrations to the
sick. They are
good neighbors, good
comrades, good citizens. . . . They have given to the world the ministry
of healing.
They have gone forth,
not as fanatics or theorists, but as empiricists, adopting the purest
findings of
medical and surgical
science and reinforcing all this with the sweet spirit. of Jesus of
Nazareth. These are
the men who unweariedly
follow the footsteps of Him who went about doing good. In every case
they have
striven to blend the
healing of the body with the healing of the soul, God bless them. To be
a Seventh-day
Adventist is to know
anew the meaning of the cross. They possess adequate funds to carry on
the Master's
work. Why? Because each
member obeys the law of the tithe. Their churches are filled with
worshippers
because they insist on
loyalty to the Lord. To the Seventh-day Adventist the peace of Christ,
and not the
madness of sinful
pleasure is the great quest of the soul. You don't find them in
passion-polluted show
houses. Their women are
not to be seen amid the shameless nudities of the modern ballroom. These
men
and women are to be
found in places where prayer is wont to be made. These people expect the
coming of
Jesus', they are
waiting for Him, and when the Master comes He will find them where
Christians ought to
be.
|