A FALSE WITNESS ANSWERED.
By C. P. B.
The Censor, a Prohibition paper which has for its motto, "Tell the Truth," says:— "The Seventh-day Adventists claim to be prohibitionists almost to a man. But their leaders are at war with the Prohibition party and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and all who work for prohibition because they are not in favor of keeping Saturday as the Sabbath rest. But those who fight prohibition need not claim to favor it." Those who are not acquainted with Seventh-day Adventists will probably believe what the Censor says about them; all others will, however, know that it is false. The Censor assumes that prohibition and the Prohibition party are inseparable. All well-informed people know that such is not the case. There are very many sincere and earnest prohibitionists outside the ranks of Adventists who do not approve the methods of the Prohibition party. The New York Evangelist, a leading Presbyterian paper, says editorially that only "about one-fifteenth of the prohibitionists of the United States have joined the Prohibition party." Is it not then a base slander to assert that because Adventists stand aloof from that party they are opposed to prohibition? Prohibition is a thing greatly to be desired, but its advocacy is not the sum of all virtues, and it would seem that the organs of the so-called Prohibition party should also cultivate truth-telling. Again the Censor asserts, "their leaders are at war with the Prohibition party and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and all who work for prohibition because they are not in favor of keeping Saturday as the Sabbath." Nothing could be farther from the truth. "Their leaders are at war with the Prohibition party and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union," only because that party and that organization seek to force upon them the keeping of a day which they cannot conscientiously observe. Adventists are not politicians, and many of them do not ordinarily vote, but wherever they have had an opportunity to vote for prohibition without at the same time endorsing measures to which they are conscientiously opposed, they have done so to a man. People who know Adventists and have any regard for truth do not say that they are opposed to prohibition.