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Honest Controversy

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Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Dec 5, 1878

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 4, No. 46.

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Honest Controversy

I LIKE controversy when it is thoroughly honest. I do admire to see two large and generous minds approach a subject at opposite quarters, and then to watch the new lights that flash over it in a thousand relations that were not obvious before. It lifts us out of the ruts of our sect and party, in whose treadmill we have been grinding all our lives, and mistaking it for the universe. But controversy with small minds is the smallest business that is done in this world. It slides inevitably into the word catching, and ends in personalities. The moment I saw a man consciously trying to put my language to a different use from what I had put it myself, I would stop short with him, and say, "I am glad to compare ideas with you, but I have no time for word-catching."