The Review and Herald by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 21, 1878

The Review and Herald.

By Editor

Battle Creek, Mich., Fifth-Day, Nov. 21, 1878.

The post-office address of Elder James White and Mrs. Ellen G. White is Denison, Texas. Box P.

A friend sends us a copy of the Iowa State Register of Nov. 8, 1878, containing a ridiculous article headed, “The Millerite Craze,” from the N. Y. Herald, in reference to the prophetic conference just held in that city. It is entitled to no consideration, one-half of it being recklessness, and the other half ignorance of the views the writer claims to be discussing. We therefore pass it by.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, New York, has just been opened. Fifty years have been occupied in its building. It is the largest ecclesiastical structure on the continent. Seventeen thousand five hundred persons can be comfortably convened within the vast edifice. There are only ten larger religious houses in the world. St. Peters at Rome, will contain fifty-four thousand persons, and Notre Dame at Paris twenty-one thousand.

In the article in another column entitled, “Among the Seventh-day Adventists,” quoted from the Herald and Presbyter, the writer mistakes somewhat in his figures. Thus the Sanitarium cost a much larger sum than he stated; but the Tabernacle will cost much less—not over $20,000, it is confidently expected.

The following paragraph from the Advance of Nov. 14, 1878, has a strong squint in favor of the religious amendment movement of the National Reform Association, with which movement our readers are well acquainted:—

Our governors are all seconding the recommendation of the President of the United States for a national thanksgiving day. They are not alarmed by the resurgent ghost of the “union of Church and State” that troubles our religious contemporary, the Independent. They hold that they have a right to represent and serve the people who have elected them, in thus, according to a custom existing since the founding of the Plymouth Colony, designating a day for special acknowledgment of our dependence, as a nation, upon the divine will. Can it be possible that these governors and the President of the United States do not read the Independent? or, reading it, do not believe in the oft-reiterated doctrines of this apostle of secularism? To be sure, this Republic would never have been possible, nor will its continuance be possible, without the morally empowering force of Christianity. There would be no more possibility of it than there would be for the proprietor of the Independent, for instance, to “give away” the moon as a “premium” for “three new subscribers.” For a civil officer, as such, to declare a preference for the Christian’s God as an object of national thanksgiving over Jupiter or Josh, is deemed a thing for religious papers and people to denounce and protest against! Well, that is not our view of the matter. Until sand-lot oratory comes to have a less significant following than it has had of late, it will be as well for our nation, as a nation, not to be ashamed to own that it is God whose kingdom is over all.