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This Week's Paper

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Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 1, 1877

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 3, No. 6.

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This Week's Paper.

By James White

WHAT we have said of the leading article of the first page of former numbers of the SIGNS could be said of the first page of the present issue. The description of the healing of the Centurion’s Son will be read with special interest.
The restitution of the dominion of the earth through Christ, which was lost in Adam, the theme of the second page of this week’s paper, is a grand and glorious subject. Bible students should read this page with Bible in hand. The casual reader should read it twice with care, then he is prepared to commence to study it with Bible in hand.
Two popular heresies have conspired to hide away from the Christian church the coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the true inheritance of the saints; (1) the conscious existence of an immortal part in Heaven between death and the resurrection; and (2), the spiritual second advent and reign of Christ.
If an immortal part of the saints goes to Heaven at death into God's presence where there is “fullness of joy,” and at his right hand where “there are pleasures forevermore,” there to remain eternally, why need Christ come back to this earth again to call forth the body?
An Indiana minister was astonished that the Adventists should make so much ado over the coming of Christ to raise the dead. He added, that as the old body of clay in which they once lived could not add to the fullness, or the duration of the joys of the saints in glory, he could not see why Christ should be to the trouble of coming back to this world to gather up the old bodies of his saints. He could not see any need of the doctrine of the second advent and the resurrection of the dead. From his stand-point, he could see that the spiritual coming and reign of Christ was in harmony with his views of natural immortality.
The careful reader can readily see how, in the fog of these two heresies, our Indiana minister could lose sight of the literal coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the inheritance of the saints on the New Earth, in fulfillment of the promise of God to Abraham.
Once broken away from these fundamental doctrines of the gospel, and the mind intoxicated with theological vagaries, the “saints secure abode” can be located without the least difficulty “beyond the bounds of time and space.” The writer does not desire such a heaven. Space is somewhere. Beyond space, is nowhere! God save us. And yet there are thousands of professed Christians who have so long been fed with mist and moonshine, that with death and such a heaven in view, they can sing with great fervor,—
“My Lord calls, and I must go Way over in the promised land.”
Dr. Laney has evidently studied well the subject of identity as applies to the resurrection of the body. His article on the fourth page of this week’s issue was handed to us by Bro. S. H. King. He took it from a Detroit paper of last autumn.
The doctor shows the legitimate result of the resurrection of the same matter that was put into the ground at death, no more, no less. He truly says that those who demand this in order to a recognition of the individual, “Know not what they demand.”
We are encouraged to labor to make the SIGNS just the paper our people everywhere will desire to circulate to the ends of the earth, wherever the English language is read. The receipts of cash in this week’s paper look well. Let the new subscriptions come in, old ones be paid up, so that present receipts may be as a few drops before a plenteous shower. J. W.