p. 42 | HIS TIME IS SHORT by Annie Teague

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 7, 1878

HIS TIME IS SHORT.

By Annie Teague

A strong breeze has been raised among infidels and liberals of every class, from Maine to California, by the arrest and placing under bonds of one D. M. Bennett, publisher of a New York City liberal paper known as the Truth Seeker, charged with sending prohibited literature through the mails. Much strong feeling has been aroused against the churches by this act, as it is claimed by the defendants that their grievances have been caused by emissaries of the churches, who are trying to bring the government to serve their purposes, by arresting and bringing to condemnation influential freethinkers.

This latest arrest being only one of several from their ranks, a loud cry goes up all over the land, and hundreds of names, representing thousands of dollars, are poured into the Bennett defense fund, filling columns in the paper he sends out. The tenor of published letters accompanying donations is hostility to the government and to the Christian religion, thus giving another impetus to the union of church and state as a defense against unorthodox liberalism, and widening the breach that will one day in the future separate bitterer hostilities than our land of religious freedom has ever witnessed.

Liberalism is solid in acrimonious attack on every branch of government, and from George Francis Train's head-light down to the nameless glow-worm in the rank and file, all utter determined resolutions to do their utmost to reform the laws of the country, and harmonize them to the requirements of rational human beings. As a first step in that direction they have printed petitions to be circulated throughout the United States, asking Congress to repeal the act prohibiting certain classes of publications from the mails, claiming the law to be detrimental to the free thought, free-speech, and free-press interests of the country. They feel confident that “victory will rest on the liberal head, though it may be at the price of blood.”—Truth Seeker, Dec. 1, 1877.

The Truth Seeker is a sixteen-page paper, devoted to the progress of the cause it leads; and as a specially attractive feature for the present year, a new department is added known as “Correspondence Extraordinary from the Infernal and Supernal regions, consisting of a series of letters written expressly for these columns from his Satanic Majesty, Old Lucifer himself, as well as his more arrogant brother, Jehovah, or Jah of the Jews, and other noted personages who have figured in the mythologies and theologies of the world.”—Truth Seeker, Dec. 8, 1877. When slight circumstances will cause so strong an element of society to rally around such a banner as the above, the outlook presents most forcibly the significance of the present truth, and its correct application of the signs of the times. ANNIE TEAGUE.