An English View

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Sep 28, 1905

A WRITER in the Pictorial and Dart, a weekly paper published in Birmingham, England, gives his impressions concerning the annual meeting of the British Union Conference which was held in the suburbs of that city. He says that “four large tents are set up in leafy glades, and here for ten days, from early morn to dewy eve, three hundred delegates of an American religious sect known as ‘Seventh-day Adventers,’ hold a ‘religious picnic’ in homely fashion.”

After giving a brief account of the arrangements for the meeting, including a reference to the vegetarian bill of fare at the dining tent, the writer says:—

“The sect I was told was founded about sixty years ago in the United States, and has branches all over the world.

“Delegates are at King’s Heath from the north, south, east, and west of England, from Germany, Cape Town, and America.

“A visit to the camp at Springfield Road should be an interesting experience to every thinking man and woman, for a study of the religious thoughts and beliefs of others is dull only to those with no soul or imagination.

“The idea of a ten days’ religious picnic is one that has great possibilities.

“And the thought was irresistible that if the churchmen and the dissenters wish to reach the masses, they must begin by open-air services, where there is the least possible ceremony, but the great fervor of conviction.

“But for their insistence about the seventh day as the proper Sabbath, and the great point they make about the early second advent, they might be earnest Wesleyans or Church Missioners.

“The speaker on Sunday morning was Elder Daniells, of Washington, U. S. A. He is an orator of a quiet but engrossing style, a born word-painter. He held his audience for forty minutes by a graphic account of the history of the prophet Daniel and his dealings with the Babylonian king, following out the history of that empire and those which followed it down to the present day.

“His allusions to palmistry, a fraud as he called it, but the success of which showed the great human anxiety to know the future, was only surpassed by his graphic description of his visit to the great painting by Michael Angelo, at St. Peter’s in Rome. The grand panorama of the birth and life and future of the human race had proved confusing to him when he first beheld it; but when he grasped the sublime subject, the figures and their story stood out like a real and living vision.

“The Seventh-day Adventers are a body bound in closest social ties by a creed which brings out intense human sympathies, and their persecution is only another element which stimulates, as it always does, religious fervor.

“After all, the Seventh-day observance is only the same drawback which is surmounted by all devout Hebrews, but it is a sufficient distinction to cause them some inconvenience, and to mark them off sharply from other sects, with which in other things they agree.

“The hymns are those of Moody and Sankey, and accompaniments are rendered by a cornet and two pianos.

“In the sunny mornings, with the sides of the tent up and a background of green pasture, a leafy fringe of oaks and elms and the blue sky above, the service is conducted in enchanting surroundings, and would move the dullest soul by its poetic beauty.”