p. 21 | Result of Time-Setting by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 15, 1875

Result of Time-Setting.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

A FIRST-DAY Adventist minister, writing in a late number of the Crisis gives this doleful picture of the condition of their churches :—

“But what is the difficulty? Seemingly this. Among Adventists are exceedingly few pastorates. There is little of an element of quiet and cemented pastoral union between people and preacher. Many churches are divided and broken. There is much that is unsettled, and is it too much to say—semi-chaotic? The mournful proclivity to attempted time definitions and determinations is a more or less constant source of division and weakness.”

“I speak of what I might mention in an unstudied way as the positive attempted horology of Adventism, where failure brings heart-breaking—and speak tenderly too, since experience of error in any direction should give the sufferer charity and inspire moderation. Yet the writer, in a recollection of mistake for the time being, would most fervently pray and study to learn from one miss a permanent lesson of care, and never, if God will, repeat a prophetic misconjecture. The repeated precipitations and disasters of day-defining for our Saviour to come in person to earth seems to be a cause for destructive divisions.”

Yes; that is the effect it has among themselves, besides disgusting the world with the very name of Adventism. Would to God they could see the truth which would save them from such folly. D. M. CANRIGHT.