This Week's Paper by Uriah Smith

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

This Week's Paper.

By Uriah Smith

The reader will find very few articles in this number to skip.

The California Conference Address by Eld. Loughborough on the first page, will be read with great interest. The progress the cause is making in that field is truly cheering. A first-day Adventist on that coast recently represented through his eastern paper (they have no paper there) that our churches were few and feeble and our cause there languishing and dying out. Whether he thought he could make himself believe this by asserting it, or whether he took pleasure in thinking he could make others believe it, we know not, and to us it matters not. His opposition is as impotent as it is groundless. The cause of God can neither be sneered down, nor lied down, nor hated down, nor fought down. The vitality of Heaven's eternal truth is in it. And even if its present friends should all leave it, God would raise up other agents to carry it forward, if he had to put a tongue into the timber of every house, and the stones of every street, to proclaim his word. All hail to the work on the Pacific Coast. God speed it forward!

The report of the Mich. T. and M. Society shows a large amount of work done. An increase of tenfold over the previous year is a matter of great encouragement. Over three thousand families visited, over two thousand letters written, over a million pages of tracts distributed, over fourteen thousand annuals, and twenty-seven thousand periodicals circulated, besides eighteen hundred and twenty-nine new subscribers obtained,—these items suggest great results in the future. Probably no other organization, religious or otherwise, has performed that amount of work in this State, the past year.

We speak in a separate note of the interesting sketch of Bro. Ribton's experience, and need not again suggest its perusal to the reader.

The Progress Department still maintains its interest. A strong and healthy growth of the work is shown, in all places from which reports are given. The cause is onward. Let our progress in holiness and consecration keep pace therewith.

U. S.