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AS WE MIGHT EXPECT

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 18, 1877

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 50, No. 16.

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AS WE MIGHT EXPECT.

By Uriah Smith

In the Boulder News, of July 21, 1876, published in Boulder, Col., we find a report of a Methodist Conference at that place, in which one of the speakers, dwelling on the temperance movement, used the following language:—
“Whatever . . . endangers the social life, or interferes with or impedes the progress of human destiny toward the goal of prosperity and happiness, must be branded as an enemy and be removed—annihilated. All hostile agencies to Christianity ally themselves with the friends of intemperance. This is true of all classes of so-called free-thinkers, and Sabbatarians and infidels. These would take from us all the hallowed and God-ordained safeguards to virtue, which have been the harbingers of all social, civil, and moral good all along the ages.”
The word “Sabbatarians” in the foregoing extract is what interests us; and the associating of this class, on the part of the speaker, with free-thinkers and infidels, and holding them up as enemies to progress, virtue, and Christianity, is an exhibition of that discrimination and good judgment for which some men are so remarkable, or else of that prejudice against the Sabbath cause which finds its best soil within the pale of the professed church of Christ.
Sabbatarians advocate, and we are happy to believe practice to a greater extent than any other denomination, the strictest morality, the purest virtue, the most radical and effectual doctrine of temperance, and the highest type of Christianity. The crime of ranking such a class with the vile and besotted company that compose the army of intemperance and infidelity admits of neither excuse nor apology. Yet such is the enmity of religious bigots against those who so rudely expose the unscriptural foundations of Sunday-keeping, as Sabbatarians do, that they will resort to any methods, however unfair and dishonest, to excite against them a storm of public odium and obloquy. We have all along predicted that such a course would be pursued, and such utterances as the foregoing give us an earnest of the fulfillment.
U. S.