Cheering by John Norton Loughborough

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 24, 1875

Cheering.

By John Norton Loughborough

It is cheering to those who are making efforts to reach their fellow-men, to learn that those efforts are successful, and productive of good. It can but be encouraging to those who are inducing others to read the SIGNS to see such readers brought to read the Bible, to believe it, and to seek God and to obey him. Better to try ninety-nine times and fail to reach the right one, than miss the hundredth one who might be reached and brought to the light of truth.

You have doubtless all heard of the minister who had toiled in a hard place for twenty years, and could see no substantial fruit of his labors, one day some one told him discouragingly that he had preached for twenty years and only one had been converted. He thought if one had been converted he was "good for twenty years more." If we had spent our means to put the SIGNS before twenty for a year, and let it preach, and it at last reached one soul, it surely ought to stimulate us to do the same again and again.

Read the following from one who has been reading the SIGNS for a few months, as a sample of what we learn of the success of the paper: "You wished all to report to you whether we are reading your paper with interest or not, or whether we wish it continued or not. I answer that I am very well pleased with your paper and wish to have it come, but I have not the money to send you at present, am hoping I will have soon."

"Your paper has done me a great deal of good, and if you continue to send it to me I will read it. Before I commenced to read your paper I had almost forgotten there was a God, but I have now begun to plead before his bar for the forgivness of my sins. I have found this world a very hard one, I think I shall prepare for a better world to come."

J. N. L.