Letter from the Church at Mill Grove, N. Y., to Elder J. M. Stephenson.
Your letter, announcing your intention to visit this state, has been received. Concerning your visiting us we would say that if you were laboring in unison with the body of the brethren who were first in the message of the third angel, and through whose instrumentality God brought the message to us and you, we would most gladly welcome you, whether you believed the visions of Sr. White or not. But we cannot engage in a faction against those whom God made choice of to introduce the last message to the world; and we fear that, if you persist in your present course, you will find, when it is too late, that you have run in vain, and labored in vain. If the visions are not of God, they will surely come to nought; and we pray God to hasten the day. But we have not been able to discover anything in them which conflicts with the commandments of God—the law and the testimony—which are the test given to us by inspiration, by which to try the spirits. Therefore we see no danger from them. But when Sr. White, or any one else, speaks anything in the name of the Lord which makes void one of God's commandments, or promises life to the transgressor, we shall feel it duty to oppose such teachings in the name of the Lord. Again, if the third angel's message, which we have heard, is of God, it will not prove a failure. Before we ever heard of it, or understood it from the Bible, God chose his own instruments by which to send it; and he knew how to choose. There may be a Judas among the chosen; but that the work should be taken out of the hands of the eleven is, we think, the height of absurdity. Such a revolution would subvert and destroy the message; or would constitute a fourth in the order, and one which is not specified in the prophecy. We therefore exhort and admonish you as a brother, to review, carefully, your past course. Ask yourself, seriously, for a sufficient reason to justify you in withdrawing fellowship from the REVIEW. Have you not, in so doing, withdrawn from the remnant of God's people? Have you not, while you hold the third angel's message, disfellowshipped and rejected the very men through whom God sent you the message? And of what flagitious crimes have all those veterans in the cause been guilty? They have believed something which you do not believe; and this before you received the truth through them; but what have they done? While God is gathering his people under the last message, have you not given your influence to the work of scattering and dividing? O, brother, come back to the fold of Christ. Remember that Christ is not divided, and that a message which he sends cannot be divided. We cannot think that God would begin a special work on earth, choose for his first instruments, those who say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan, and then in the midst of the work, choose others to complete it, to whom the first will be compelled to bow down and confess that God has loved them. This will be the case if you are right; but we believe that our Father is more excellent in working than this. O be wise! and let the Lord work in his own way. If he has commenced the work, he will finish it; and if he has not, the workmen are all laboring in vain; and we shall do better to follow the example of the first babel-builders, when God confounded their language—"they left off to build." As you desire salvation, with unfeigned love we beseech you to be reconciled to God and his children, and thus return to the place of your rest. BRETHREN.
R. F. COTTRELL,
ELIJAH BOYERS,
DANIEL SMALLEY.
JOHN H. COTTRELL,
SOLOMON G. COTTRELL,
RANSOM WOODIN,
WILLETT S. COTTRELL.
SISTERS.
C. M. COTTRELL,
MARY BOYERS,
R. SMALLEY,
M. COTTRELL,
E. P. BELOW,
M. E. DEVEREUX,
Mill Grove, N. Y., Dec. 16th, 1855.