LETTER FROM PORTUGAL by C. E. Rentfro

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 11, 1906

LETTER FROM PORTUGAL.

By C. E. Rentfro

There is no country about which Seventh-day Adventists ought to know more than Portugal. With its four million inhabitants who can not read the Bible, even if allowed to have one, it needs the fostering care of a people who can give the poor, down-trodden ones a definite, distinct, life-saving message.

To those Protestants in the United States who are seeking to enforce religious ideas by the power of civil authority, to cause all to cease labor and to formally worship God on Sunday, a change from their place to that of the Portuguese Protestant might bring a practical lesson. I will mention three cases, which were well reported in the daily papers, as religious persecution.

Not long ago a colporteur of the British and Foreign Bible Society was arrested at the instigation of a priest, in a province of North Portugal. He was kept in prison eight days. The agent for the society here wrote to friends there, as well as to the authorities, and the governor of the province ordered the prisoner to be freed. The Bibles were retained, the complaint being that they contained statements contrary to the state religion. Thus Rome seeks to keep the Bible from the people.

Another case shows what the Catholic Church will do with the believer in the Bible. On the 20th of December an old woman was arraigned before the tribunal for offenses against the state religion. The priestly accuser complained of her because she would not give the usual kiss to the images. Her age was sixty years, yet with her Testament in her hand, she sought to sustain her belief. The judge released her, and took occasion to censure the priest quite strongly.

On this case the Messenger, a paper edited by a Protestant minister, says: “Verily the ministers of the pope are showing very clearly the weakness to which their church has arrived, when they judge themselves so gravely offended by a poor old widow! They themselves are proving to us that, destitute of the Spirit of God, the Roman Church is as a dead body that only helped by the temporal arm can maintain itself on foot.” And yet their ministering brethren of the Protestant churches in America and other countries are seeking the same kind of help. The comment is pertinent just now.

I will also note the arrest of two teachers of the Bible, one an old minister of some eighty years, and the other a professor in a school. Both were arrested, and occupied a place in a jail for some time for the crime of singing and reading and practising sentiments subversive of the state religion on the occasion of a funeral. They gave bail to the amount of four hundred dollars. Now these men can sympathize with honest Christian souls in other countries who believe in following the Bible in keeping God’s holy Sabbath and working on the first day of the week, and yet are thrust into prison with common criminals on account of their religion.

In a number of places here men are striving to bring the Sunday rest-day before the public, partly on a business basis and partly because of religious bias. Before such measures are enforced by law, we are desirous that these people may receive the light of “present truth.” We have published three thousand copies of No. 5 of the “Family Bible Teacher.” Some of these have gone to Brazil, Bermuda Islands, and China. Elder Morrow, of Hamilton, Bermuda, wrote us saying that twenty persons, mostly grown people, have begun the observance of the Sabbath there. We should like to see from among them recruits for Portugal and Brazil. If Brazil shares with her mother country in sending a Portuguese worker, she should have help to feed the hundreds of thousands who go to her from Portugal. We should be able to load them up before they go there.

We are now publishing another Bible-reading on the “Signs of Christ’s Coming,” and as I am now able to do effective work in giving Bible studies in the native language, together with the Arauto da Verdade, which is being much improved, we hope to see souls embracing the truth in this part of the Iberian Peninsula. I have learned that there are thousands of Portuguese in California, and believe that those of our Sabbath-keeping Portuguese in that state might help Portugal by scattering our literature among their countrymen there. Those in turn will carry or send the truth back to their home country. Readers of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES residing in east Massachusetts would also do well to send for some of our Portuguese literature to distribute among the Portuguese people there.

We have some friends who are studying the points of our faith, and others who are learning the first principles of Bible study. Once a week, twenty or thirty children and grown people come to our home to learn the hymns. Mrs. Renfro has had a good privilege of breaking prejudice and winning hearts by nursing cases of sickness.

Pray for poor Portugal. C. E. RENTFRO.