p. 172 | NO WONDER by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 30, 1876

NO WONDER.

By Uriah Smith

The Restitution is still exceedingly annoyed at the union existing both in sentiment and practice among S. D. Adventists, and in a recent number makes another attempt to show that facts are not facts, or, in other words, that we are changing our expositions when we are not, and that we are at variance on points where we most fully agree. It asks why Eld. Waggoner's work on the Law is now omitted from our list of publications. For the very good reason, we answer, that the edition was long ago exhausted, and it has since been out of print. Did the Restitution never have any of the editions of its works run out of print, by being sold out and thus exhausted? Or is there so little demand for the works which it publishes, that when an edition is once issued, it lasts forever! We are happy to say that Eld. Waggoner has re-written his work on the Law; it has already appeared in the Review; and we hope to see it in book form in due time.

But the principal object of the present effort of the Restitution is to array Eld. Waggoner and the writer against each other. It refers to our late article on the Two Covenants, in which we show that the ten commandments were not the old covenant, then quotes from the work of Eld. W., to show that the ten commandments were the old covenant; a position which Eld. W. has never held nor advocated since he became an observer of the seventh day. The quotation given is this: “These commandments [the ten

commandments] are all that were comprehended in the expressions, ‘Obey my voice,’ and ‘keep my covenant,’ as we have seen that these constituted the covenant which he spake with his voice and wrote on two tables of stone; and it is said in Deut. 5:22, ‘He added no more.’”

Now this is exactly what we said in the article above referred to; namely, that God had a covenant antedating the covenant made with Israel; that that was called his covenant; that this was the ten commandments, the covenant commanded, not the covenant made. The two are just as distinct as any two objects can be, as both Eld. W. and myself have held, and still do hold. Yet the Restitution holds this up as a great contradiction between Smith and Waggoner, and asks which the S. D. A. people will follow; whereas, if in all other things we shall always be able to agree as fully as we do in this, there will be no need of any prayer in our behalf that we may be one.

Now our heading applies; and we just wish to say that if people will not or cannot examine subjects more carefully than the Restitution has examined this matter, if they will not or cannot go any deeper below the surface than it has done in this instance, it is no wonder that the Sabbath truth and its kindred doctrines, which are as clear as the noon-day sun, are still before their clouded vision but a mass of mist and moonshine. But this state of things denotes a condition of the head or heart sincerely to be commiserated. U. S.