p. 61 | Items of Interest by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 3, 1874

Items of Interest.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

WHAT THEY WILL DO.

THAT those who are seeking to amend the Constitution will oppress those who differ from them, is manifest from the unguarded words which now and then escape from them. Thus the Christian Register says:—

“It is reported that, at a recent convention held by those who are now agitating for a theological amendment to the Federal Constitution, an eminent clergyman said, in substance: ‘If it be objected that such an amendment would take away from the atheist the right to vote, I answer, The rights of the atheist are just like those of any other madman.’”

That is to say, they have no rights. So they will very naturally and easily conclude the same of those who desecrate the (so-called) Christian Sabbath.

RAPID GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES.

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe has lately made a tour through the West. Of its rapid growth she says:—

“It is twenty-three years since we have seen this great West, and in this rapid flight through it, it seems as if towns and cities and palaces had grown up here as Aladdin’s palace did by the work of genii.”

How truly the prophet represents it as “coming up out of the earth.”

NOT SPIRITUAL DEATH.

Orthodoxy has always contended that the death threatened Adam included spiritual death. This it has regarded as one of its strongholds. But Edward Beecher, D. D., in the Christian Union, June 11, 1873, thus truly remarks:—

“Great efforts have been made under dogmatic influences to carry back the idea of spiritual death to the sentence pronounced on Adam and his race. But that sentence is its own interpreter: ‘Till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ The Jewish writers of the Alexandrine period and the Greek fathers took this view, and their interpretation is confirmed by the apostle Paul. Any other view is contrary to the whole genius of the Old Testament typical dispensation.” D. M. CANRIGHT.