The New Volume by James White

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 28, 1876

The New Volume.

By James White

With the new year we commence the new volume of the Signs of the Times. “Happy New Year,” dear reader, and may you find much joy in perusing the several numbers of this paper for 1877.

Our first object shall be during the current year to give the reasons of our faith and hope. We have commenced this work at several times during the last five years and have been broken off from it by adverse circumstances which we could not control. Paul would have made a pastoral visit to the church at Thessalonica at a certain time, but “Satan hindered him.”

But under most favorable circumstances we enter again upon the work of our choice, and resolve, by the grace of God, that nothing shall hinder us this time. Redemption is a grand and glorious theme. And we are very happy in contemplating it, and in bringing out those great fundamental facts upon which the faith and hope of the gospel are built.

Mrs. White designs to furnish matter for each number of the Signs which will deeply interest all our readers. Her expositions of scripture truths, practical appeals, and her life sketches, will add great importance to this volume of our paper.

The “Home Circle” will be a department of great importance to every family. Here will be found lessons of self-control, mutual forbearance and love, respect for parents, the power of kindness toward children, and the great moral and religious lessons of life, which should bless every household. These articles for the family circle, embracing parents as well as children, are not hastily snatched from our exchanges for this year. They have been selected by the watchful, critical eye of a mother, during the twenty years she has been leading her own children to manhood, and by her hand pasted in huge scrap-books from which they are now taken.

“Good Health” is also a department of practical importance to every family. This column will be filled each week with the choicest selections, containing the most authentic facts upon the great subject of how to live so as to secure to ourselves and to our children the greatest amount of physical, mental, and moral power. Here will be found a thousand hints, and cautions, and bits of timely advice for all.

And the departments of “Religious News and Notes,” and “Secular News,” will be selected and edited with great care, and with the object ever in view to meet the wants of the reading public.

The Signs of the Times will be devoted, agreeably to our first design, to expositions of prophecy, to stating the reasons of our faith and hope, to recording the signs of our times in current events in fulfillment of prophecy, to practical godliness, and to religious and secular news. And neither time, nor labor, nor means will be spared to make it such a paper as the friends of the cause will take pleasure in circulating among their friends and neighbors, and in sending abroad in our own and in other countries wherever the English language is read.

We are happy to know that hundreds of personal friends, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, take a lively interest in the circulation of the Signs. The Tract and Missionary Societies in the several States have taken hold of the work in earnest, and in a manner to insure success. With the blessing of God upon the conductors of the paper, and upon the efforts of those who labor to circulate it, the volume of the Signs of the Times for 1877 will be a power in the land to shake the foundation of error, and build up the cause of Bible truth. J. W.