p. 395 | B. G. ST. JOHN by B. G. St. John

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1867

B. G. ST. JOHN

By B. G. St. John

From Bro. St. John.

BRO. SMITH: Enclosed I send you slips from the Alta Californian (one of the leading journals of this city), containing a synopsis of two discourses; one on the coming of the Lord, and the other on the Resurrection, by one of our “reverend” religious teachers. I do this, not because I am in harmony with the sentiments therein expressed, but that the friends in Battle Creek may see something of the monstrous errors that are weekly proclaimed to this people for gospel truths, as well as to understand that this is really a good missionary field for a man filled with the spirit and love of God, of strong faith, and mighty in the Scriptures. All of the popular isms of the day—Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, Swedenborgianism, and Spiritualism, in all their subdivisions,—exist here in a flourishing condition, and yet there is not one to hold up the law of God as the rule of life, or to proclaim the soon coming of the Lord in visible majesty to verify to the saint his long cherished hope. So blinded have these teachers become by tradition, and so intoxicated with the wine of Babylon, that they put darkness for light, bitter for sweet, and fables for God’s holy word of truth.

I have read your paper with interest and profit for several years, and though I do not fully understand all its utterances, I esteem it highly for the stirring Bible truths spread upon its pages and the spirit that pervades its controversial articles.

I am quite sure that the law of God is the truth, and that it is binding upon all; that the seventh day of each week is the Sabbath of the Lord, and that man should cease from all his work on that day in token of his acknowledgment that the Lord—the creator of all things, is the only living and true God—that this seventh-day Sabbath was to be a perpetual sign, a memorial to those who keep it, and is as unrepeatable in its very nature as is the great truth that God is the Creator of all things.

Myself and wife are among the few in this region who keep the Sabbath, and are watching and waiting for the coming of our Lord, hoping to be found in Him, without spot and blameless. We have had occasional meetings, and now purpose to hold them every Sabbath for exhortation and prayer, praying that the Lord would send some one of his servants to this far off coast, that the great things of His law might be proclaimed here where “darkness covers the land and gross darkness the people.”

B. G. ST. JOHN

San Francisco Co., Cal.