The Adventists and the Rest of Us by Dudley Marvin Canright

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1875

"The Adventists and the Rest of Us."

By Dudley Marvin Canright

UNDER the above heading the Examiner and Chronicle of May 6, has the following well-deserved rebuke for those who neglect and oppose the doctrine of the second advent, and spiritualize away that grand Bible doctrine. But the churches are too far gone in apostasy to heed this much-needed advice.

"But some who avoid the error of the Adventists fall into a still greater one, if tried by a Scriptural standard. Too many have no faith in the Advent, and no expectation of it. It is to them at best a figure of rhetoric—to some a rejected superstition. This skepticism is not confined to Unitarians and Free Religionists. Men of reputed orthodoxy sublimate the second coming of Christ, the resurrection and the last Judgment, into poetical imagery by which the experiences of the soul in passing from this to another life are illustrated. Not a few of those who retain the Scriptural faith in their forms of doctrine, at least in general terms, give no study to the subject, and have for it no definite place in their scheme of belief. They seldom think of it. They have no particular feeling about it. It can hardly be that they have a real expectation of it. When we think of the almost total silence which prevails on this truth in the churches, it is not surprising that the preachers of premillennialism conceive themselves to be called to the prophets' work of awakening the people of God from slumber. And since there is so much testimony in Scripture that our Lord is coming again, many who do not hear the truth from sober students of God's Word receive it, with all its admixtures of error, from the fanatics of Second Adventism.

This condition of things is not to be remedied by pastors making haste to preach on the subject, and then discharging their minds of it for an indefinite time. The great expectation of the primitive believers, which illuminates the New Testament, especially the apostolic epistles, needs to be intelligently entertained and vitally cherished. The truth, known and loved, and recognized in the worship of the churches, will be the sufficient preservative against error, and will have power in producing a more unworldly piety—the character of those who "look for" and "love" His appearing."

D. M. C.