OUR PAPER | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 6, 1879

OUR PAPER.

I am not especially favorable to eulogies either spoken or written, since they often arise from a disposition to flatter. Yet I trust no one who is alive to the importance and magnitude of the third angel’s message will attribute any such motive to me when I say that next to my Bible nothing is read with so keen an interest as our paper. How it is that some S. D. Adventists can live year after year without this weekly visitor is a mystery to me; and yet I find that some of the officers even of the tract society are without the paper. It is no wonder that such persons have but a faint idea of the vastness of this work and the rapidity with which it is spreading.

As I read the letters of Bro. Matteson in Review Supplement of Feb. 6, my heart sent up a silent prayer for God to convert the sinners who are dying spiritually for want of a disposition to sacrifice. While I felt sad to think Bro. Matteson should be so cramped for means, I felt a thrill of joy as I read how the multitudes flocked to hear him. Then there was Bro. Ribton’s letter with his account of a whole church being converted to the truth. Who can read such things unmoved? And who can say, after reading Bro. Loughborough’s report of how the work is opening up before him in Great Britain, that there is no virtue in the distribution of reading matter? And yet there are some who refuse to work in connection with the tract society, because they can see no advantage in it. But it is in the REVIEW that the reports of these societies are published, and those who cannot interest themselves in that kind of reading, can find at least one person for whom they can pray to advantage, without going from home.

Then there is the progress department, containing reports from some whom we have seen and known, and from scores whom we may never see this side of the kingdom. But it is useless to enumerate. No portion of the paper can be neglected without loss. May God bless our dear paper, and all who help make it what it is. *