A Sketch of Experience.
By William Covert
I BEGAN the observance of the Sabbath in February, 1868. I was a member of an “Age to Come” Adventist Church at the time, and thought that the Jews would soon be restored to the land of Palestine, and rebuild old Jerusalem, and that Christ would come and raise the sleeping saints and change the living righteous who believed as I did, to immortality, and the worst of the wicked would be destroyed; but a middle class who were neither righteous nor wicked, would survive. These we denominated “the left of the nations,” and we believed that they, as well as the “Twelve Tribes of Israel,” would be on probation in a mortal state during the millennium; that Christ would rule on “David’s throne” in Jerusalem, and the immortal saints would constitute his Cabinet or Royal Court, etc., etc. Thus we started out with the doctrine of the millennium, nearly agreeing in a few particulars. But the farther we traveled the less nearly we agreed, until, finally, no one could agree with himself a fortnight at a time; and when we reached the end of the one thousand years, some had many more ages to come in the future beyond that time, in which the dead were to be raised by decades and have a new probation. We claimed to be the “Brethren of the One Faith,” and indeed our faith was as uniform as the color of Jacob’s cattle. Yet I felt certain that there was an age of probation beyond this dispensation, and this in a general way we called the “Age to Come.” I do sincerely pity any one who gets entangled in the meshes of this doctrine, because he cannot see clearly the ground just before him that he may get a firm footing on anything. The deceptive mirage of the future age blinds his eyes so that he does not see the dangers in the road over which he has to travel. I continued to advocate this doctrine until the Tipton camp-meeting in 1870. That meeting, though a very small one, still has possession of the richest spot in my heart. I had learned to obey God before that time, but there I learned to love him. I went there prejudiced against Sister White, only because she contradicted the doctrine of the Age to Come. Her earnest appeals and solemn admonitions, united with the efforts of Brother White, softened my heart, and it was in an impressible condition when Brother Littlejohn arose to speak upon the “Hour of Judgment.” I had disbelieved the Messages because I could not harmonize them with the Age to Come. I had tried to place them and the prophetic periods in the future age as props for our hobby. I had never had the privilege of listening to one of our ministers on the subject, but when he had finished speaking, I believed the hour of God’s Judgment is come. None but those who have been deceived by this stupefying doctrine, and then liberated therefrom, can comprehend its deceptive influence. I had been watching the Catholic council that had been sitting in Rome that year, and the decree of “Infallibility” was of present interest; and I was prepared to believe it to be the most blasphemous decree ever voted by the “little-horn” power. And when the point was made that the “great words which the horn spake” was after “the Judgment was set and the books were opened,” I could no longer refuse to believe in the present truth. I now had the right end of the prophetic string, and as I unrolled it, every point in the Age-to-Come theory vanished from the field of prophecy, and truth, beautiful, symmetrical, and strong, stretched out before me and bridged every chasm that I had been trying in vain to span with the theory that I had tried so hard to utilize. The law and the Sabbath possessed new beauty and force. The millennium was no longer an unmeaning riddle, and the sanctuary and atonement opened up the whole plan of salvation so completely that I have seen no cause for entanglement in my Biblical studies since. At first I did not realize that I was so effectually divorced from my old theory. It was not until I had made a voyage of discovery up and down the prophetic streams that I discovered that I had been using the timbers prepared for the great temple of truth to bolster up error, and when every piece was brought into its place nothing was lacking. Within one month I was enabled to relate to the Brethren Lane and the members of my church what a revolution had been effected in my mind, and we wept tears of joy, rejoicing that we could see eye to eye.