An Incident by the Way.
By Editor
We received a letter the other day from one of earth's aged pilgrims. A number of years ago he was connected with the work for which this paper stands; if we rightly remember, he was one of the editorial correspondents of the Signs of the Times. The work at that time was small and extremely unpopular. With the strength of young manhood, he became ambitious of greater things; the small denomination, the lack of appreciation doubtless in the greatness of God's work and message, seemed to hinder and cramp and bind him. He, therefore, left the message and united with one of the popular churches. He said as he went away from us that he had nothing but respect and good feelings for us, but he felt that he had a larger field to preach Christ and win souls. Somehow his great hopes and ambitions have not materialized; we have heard of no great revivals which have followed his labors, or souls which have been won to the Master; but, instead of that, his chief strength and ambition have been used in the direction of breaking down the people to which he once belonged, and yet he still seems to conceive of them as they were at the time he belonged to them. He does not seem to know how they have grown or how the message has developed. He looks at a few others who have been dissatisfied as he was, and seems to think that they are the strength of the people, and that their dissatisfaction and divisions and factions will be the ruin of the work and of the denomination; and yet, never in all the history of the work, since the great Threefold Message of God, told in Rev. 14:6-14, was given to the world, has the message been going with greater strength than now. It has penetrated every land, and Gospel lights have been kindled in all the great countries of the world. Men may halt and refuse to go forward with God's message; they only are the losers; the message goes on just the same. Men may choose numbers rather than principles; the numbers will melt away, but the principles will triumph. How much greater satisfaction would this aged man's life have been had he given his whole heart and soul to the work of God, crushed every ambition save that of glorifying the Master and working where He would have him work, rather than to have turned his whole power and strength to the destroying of that which he had once, in God, helped to build, and have nothing at last to bring him satisfaction save what can be obtained from the adherence to a negative. Such cases are only temporal incidents in the onward progress of truth, but they are of eternal import to the individual.