A PLAIN TALK TO THE MURMURERS by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 24, 1877

A PLAIN TALK TO THE MURMURERS.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

Some Facts for Those Who Are not in Harmony with the Body.

(Continued.)

Now behold the result. Soon their little paper began to question one point and then another. Our position on the sanctuary was given up; the position on the two-horned beast was denied; the first message was applied somewhere else, the second moved out of its place, and finally the third message as applying to our work, was scouted. Well, in a short time the little piping paper brought the news that one of their two principal men, Elder Brinkerhoff, had renounced the faith entirely, and was a full-fledged Universalist. He had given up Sabbath, Advent, and all, and that was the last of his connection with the work. Still more astonishing, but a few months had rolled around when the forlorn little Hope came out with flag at half mast, sorrowfully announcing that its reverend father, Elder Snook, had apostatized from the faith, and was now preaching for the Universalists!

Soon the news also came that Daniel Hull had forsaken the frail boat, and taken a berth among the spiritualists, where he is now. After a few years’ struggle, Eld. Shortridge enlisted in the same craft, and to-day is an unworthy member of even the spiritualist crowd. Did not that party see their mistake by this time, and, like honest men, confess their errors, and take their stand with the people of God? Some did; but most of them did not. Rebellion is like the leprosy. Once in the system it is about incurable. How men, after the hand of God had blasted them and scattered them like that, could be so blinded as to persevere in such a work is more than I can understand.

While these older and abler hands, the fathers and founders of the work, were forsaking their cause, new recruits of smaller talent came in, to take their places, evidently hoping to get a little notoriety out of the thing, if nothing more. Almost anybody would be received, who made any show of helping their cause. Take an example or two, as we have not time to dwell upon all. One Eld. Nathan Fuller, of Pennsylvania, quite a talented man, had been with us for several years. But about this time, he turned out to be a most corrupt man. He had committed adultery time and again under the most aggravating circumstances. When this became public, the neighborhood was terribly incensed against him—threatened to mob him. Of course this was a terrible disgrace to our cause, and we felt it as such. The best we could do was to expose the man and his crimes through our paper; and this we did. Neither he nor any one pretended to deny our charges. Indeed he confessed them squarely, because he was compelled to do so.

And now (who could have believed it?) this very man, Fuller, but a short time afterwards went to the head-quarters of that party where their paper was published, and professed to have changed his views, to have rejected the visions, etc. Though they well knew of his crimes, yet his rejection of the visions was enough to recommend him there. He was received among them as a Christian minister, and taken in to preach for them, which he did; and farther than that, they undertook to defend him as a Christian man, not denying however the licentiousness and adultery of which he had been guilty. Well, as we might know, that did not last long. Finding that Eld. Fuller did not help their cause, but was rather a stink in the nostrils of the better part of their own party, they dropped him.

Soon after that, the next prominent man in that movement was one Eld. Goodenough, of Wisconsin. He also was one of the crooked sticks dropped out of our ranks. Being reproved by our people, he professed to have changed his views on the visions, and went over to that party. That was sufficient to recommend him to them. They received him with open arms, notwithstanding his record among us. For two or three years this man flourished among them like a green bay-tree. Their little paper was crowded with his writings, and heavy books of a dozen pages or more came forth from his pen. Like the others he boasted great things. The Battle Creek party was going down, he said, and they were rapidly coming up.

At Brighton, Iowa, about five years ago, he told me that their party had forty ministers, and that they had flourishing churches here and there, and others were rapidly forming. He thought that in a very few years’ time our people would be entirely scattered, and others would take the great work in hand of warning the world. He succeeded in dividing our churches at both Brighton and Richland. But, alas for the party! that was about the end of him. The next thing I heard was that the church had expelled him for bad conduct. He was turned out of the church, and silenced as a preacher; and whenever they expel men, it is morally certain that they are pretty bad cases.

The churches of which they once boasted, where are they now? All their able ministers have left them, and renounced the doctrine. They formed a society to publish the paper, but got into a quarrel among themselves, and the paper stopped. Each faction sent out circulars accusing the other of all sorts of wrong dealing. After a while a private individual for a small consideration gathered up the remnants of the office, and is now making a hard struggle to publish a semi-monthly. Of their old churches formed when they first started, I can now learn of only one or two where Sabbath meetings are regularly held. And even these have lost many members. The editor in a late paper says, “Our cause in Iowa has long been in a broken-down condition.” This is the story from their own lips. A very few new churches have been raised up within five years, and these are now in a fair way to follow the others. By the contributors to their paper, it is seen at a glance that they are simply composed of scattered material, one here, two or three there, but scarcely enough anywhere to maintain meetings.

As I look over the columns of their paper, I know the history of a large number of their contributors. They are largely these fault-finders who have fallen out of our ranks here and there in opposition to various moves our people have made. That this is where they mostly come from is thus confessed by the editor in a late number of his paper. Speaking of us he says, “When it is remembered that many of our readers were once connected with that organization,” etc. Yes, we know them well, many of them to our sorrow and the disgrace of the cause. Some who are prominent as writers in the paper have not kept the Sabbath for years, and do not keep it now, though they solemnly vowed when they left us that they would never give it up. Others are men who have preached for twenty years, and yet have not built up a single church anywhere, nor do they have a particle of influence where they are known. Those who were once with these preachers have forsaken them, and they are left dried up, dead, and alone; and the only way that the world knows of them is by their articles in that paper.

I know many of the persons who have left us, and I know them to be hard cases. That party may whitewash them, and defend them as long as they choose, but these are the facts. The principal business of that party is to give aid and comfort to the unworthy, unruly, disorderly members who have either been reproved in our churches, or expelled from them, or have been unable to find admittance into them. All such persons find a ready asylum among that party and a welcome hearing in their paper. The only recommendation they need is to write something against the visions or S. D. Adventists. It is published greedily. Nearly every number furnishes illustrations of this. I can count them by the dozen. A paper just at hand contains a letter from one of this class. Oh! how he was oppressed by the visions! What freedom he has now! Yes, I know him well. He had no trouble with the visions till they exposed his hypocrisy in pretending to keep the Sabbath while breaking it all the time. He worked upon it whenever his business pressed.

Here is another one, a woman, expelled from the church for falsehood, intimacy with a married man, etc. All these, and many more like them, are taken aboard the little craft with rejoicing. But most of these persons who have gone from us to them claim to have been abused and oppressed by the visions or by Bro. White. But I know this to be utterly false in the cases of many who claim it, and I believe it is in all. One man, for example, complains bitterly in their paper about being oppressed by the visions. Now neither Bro. nor Sr. White ever had a word to say to him, nor anything to do with him. No vision or testimony ever referred to him in the remotest manner. After being bored by him for several days, I gave him a sharp reproof for living in adultery, and leading brethren of the church indorsed what I said. Off he puts to the rebels with a doleful tale about the visions. That is enough. He is welcome.

Yes; to hear their story, they have all been terribly abused by us. But does this prove that it is so? Who does not know that crooked, disorderly members of any church when reproved or expelled always claim to have been abused? They haven’t done anything wrong; oh! no. It reminds me of a story that Mr. Moody tells. He once visited a prison, and talked with the prisoners. He expected they would all feel very guilty, and be glad of offered mercy. But no. One had been unjustly accused, another said the judge had been bribed, another that false witnesses had been hired against him, another one claimed that they had got the wrong man, etc., etc. Says Mr. Moody, Those prisoners were the most innocent set of fellows I had ever found. The only guilty persons were the judge, the jurors, and the witnesses.

So it is with those who have been so terribly oppressed by S. D. Adventists. To hear them you would think they were the only good Christians among us. The rest of us have either been bought or scared into submission to Bro. White or the visions. We are corrupt and oppressive. All of this is just what we might naturally expect them to say in order to justify themselves. But we are prepared to show that these accusations are wholly false. No one among us, who is walking with the Lord, knows anything about the oppression of which they complain.

D. M. CANRIGHT.

(To be Continued.)