SEVENTH AND FIRST-DAY ADVENTISTS.
THE question has been raised, What is the difference between Seventh-day and First-day or No-day Adventists? In answer to which we quote as follows from a tract published at this office entitled, "Seventh-day Adventists, their Origin, Progress, and Principles":— As respects chronology, the latter, believing that the prophetic periods were given to make known the time of Christ's coming, and that they have not yet ended, are held to one of two conclusions: either that all that is said in the Bible about these periods is so much of revelation unrevealed, or else that the time of Christ's coming is to be known. The first conclusion, as consistent believers in the Bible, they cannot adopt, and hence their continual efforts to re-adjust the prophetic periods and fix upon the time for Christ to come. From this has arisen in these later years all the fantastic time-setting which has very properly disgusted the world, and worse than this, has brought reproach on prophetical study. On the other hand, SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS SET NO TIME.
They do not believe that any prophetic period given in the Bible reaches to the coming of Christ, or was designed to mark the day or year of that event. But while we do not throw away the prophetic periods, but believe they are to be understood, we believe also that they have been correctly interpreted, and have all terminated; so that now we have no data from which to reason respecting a definite time for the Lord to come. Two causes have operated to introduce the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath among Adventists, and thus to develop that class known as Seventh-day Adventists. First, a seventh-day Baptist sister, Mrs. Rachel D. Preston, from the State of New York, moved to Washington, N. H., where there was a church of Adventists. From them she received the doctrine of the soon-coming of Christ, and in return instructed them in reference to the claims of the fourth commandment of the decalogue. This was 1844. Nearly that whole church immediately commenced the observance of the seventh day, and thus have the honor of being the first Seventh-day Adventist church in America. The ravages of death, and removals from the place, have considerably diminished their numbers; but the church there still lives to bear witness to the truth thus introduced among them. The Sabbath question began immediately to be agitated among Adventists, and within a few months many from their ranks commenced its observance. Another cause which has tended to strengthen them in the observance of the seventh Sabbath is the subject of the sanctuary. It was seen at once that the central object in the sanctuary, in whichever dispensation we view it, is the ark of God, which was enshrined in the most holy place. This ark was prepared expressly as a receptacle for the tables of stone on which were written the great moral precepts of God's government, the ten commandments. Thus attention was called to the law of God. It was also seen that if the law in the ark of the heavenly sanctuary, Rev. 11 : 19, is the great original, and that de posited in the typical sanctuary was only a copy or tran script, that law must read the same now as it read then, and the idea of any change is placed beyond the range of possibilities; that heaven and earth, as Christ in his first sermon declared, would sooner pass than one jot or tittle would pass from the law; and the fourth commandment requires of the second house of Israel what it required of the first, and has required from the Eden down, the observance of the seventh day of the week, as the grand and glorious memorial of our crea tion at the hands of God.