SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS.
By The Cottage Pulpit
THE Seventh-day Adventists of Tennessee held their annual conference in Nashville during the early part of September. It was our privilege to attend two or three of their public services, and to hear some of their ministers preach the word of God, which, so far as we heard, was done faithfully and impressively, to the edification of the large audiences in attendance. They are a self-denying, earnest, intelligent body of men, and, though few in numbers compared to other Protestant bodies around them, and young comparatively as a church organization, seemed to have more than an ordinary share of the life, energy, and push of the Christians of the first century of the Christian era. They believe that they are providentially raised up for a special purpose in the fulfillment of prophecy, and if they do not “turn the world upside down,” once more, as did Paul and his colaborers of old, it will be because the world is too old and decayed to bear such handling at this late day, and will fall to pieces of the accumulating bulk of its own corruption, like an over-freighted, rickety old vessel at sea. The special message these Seventh-day Adventists are bearing out to the professing Christian world, far and near, is not a new one, but as old, at least, as the book of Revelation; nor is its proclamation peculiar to this time, for wherever the lids of the Bible have been unclasped it has been there to confront the eye, and wherever the word has been fully read and faithfully preached, there the voice of the third angel has sounded to the ears willing to hear and heed his heavenly warning. But since, instead of heeding, the mass within Babylon have refused to “come out of her,” and particularly for the reason that the Protestant millions that came out of her a few centuries ago are now by some strange and strong delusion about to fall back, an unresisting prey, into her foul embrace, it seemed needful that the Lord should raise up an extraordinary power to herald this his merciful warning to men. May the Lord double their measure of life, and energy, and push in the work he may have specially given them to do, and help them to stick to that work.—The Cottage Pulpit.