Extracts from Letters

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

Extracts from Letters.

It is encouraging to know that a few at least of the thousands who read the SIGNS have been benefited by its perusal from week to week. We give below a few brief extracts from the many letters we have received at this Office.

A sister in Indianapolis writes to the SIGNS as follows:— “Permit me to express my gratitude to you for the good done in my family by your visits. For nearly three years I have found your teachings ever pure, and according to God’s Word. My husband has seen the evil and danger of tobacco-using, and, after being a slave to it for forty years, has abandoned its use. He finds his health and mind much improved by the change. It would take too much space to recount the many blessings that has come to us as the direct result, under God, of your teachings. Among the greatest is the Sabbath truth. Thank God that we heard and obeyed. May we still follow on to know the Lord.” A brother writes from Nebraska to have his paper continued, and says, “I love to read your paper. I also take the Review. They are a feast every week.” A friend sends the money to renew his subscription and says: “I value the SIGNS very much. As I am one of the lonely ones I do not hear preaching often. I long for the weekly visits of our dear papers, the SIGNS and Review, which come laden with precious food for the hungry soul.”

Another friend who has just moved to Florida wishes to have his paper sent to that place. He says, “Some friend commenced sending us the SIGNS nearly a year ago. Its perusal has opened up new fields of thought and inquiry and hence it is a welcome visitor.”

The following is an extract from a private letter which has been placed in our hands: “Regard for the truth compels me to say I am not coming into the S. D. A. belief but I have been dragged into it against my will. Christened in the established church of England, raised with its prayer-book in my hands, educated in its parish schools, I grew up prejudiced, bigoted, and with a strong sectarian bias. I went to sea while a boy and became a profane and reckless sailor, and after years of wandering on sea and land, concluded to take a tract of land and to fulfill the conditions of the U. S. Homestead law (not however with any idea of abolishing that law by so doing) and thus obtain a home and make provision for future needs. A kind and hospitable S. D. A. family resided near me and I began to visit them and read their papers and books, and study my often neglected Bible in order to prove to them the absurdity of their belief. My reason was however soon convinced that on the Sabbath, sleep of the dead, destruction of the wicked, soon coming of our Lord, and baptism, they had the truth while I was in error, so I can write as did R. F. Cottrell, “I am a Baptist, and I am more.”

A minister of the old school Baptist denomination who has been a “careful reader of the SIGNS for the past two years,” writes to us as follows: “The principles and practices as advocated in the SIGNS in the main I believe. I never saw any authority in the New Testament for calling the first day of the week the Sabbath, and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead have ever been to me a mystery that I could not solve according to popular opinion. My mind is made up, after long careful and prayerful investigation, to spend the residue of my days with the Adventists. I never heard one of that profession preach, but I love an earnest people, and them that look for the appearing of the Son of God, for unto them that look for him will he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.”