p. 4 | Untitled article by Editor

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 12, 1857

SYNOPSIS OF THE PRESENT TRUTH. No. 1.

By Editor

THERE are some truths which are important in every age of the world; there are others, which are important, so to speak, only at particular periods. Some run parallel with the course of time; others are developed by the course of time. Some, relating to our fallen condition, our duty and our destiny, concerned the first man that ever inhabited the world, as much as they will the last whose eyes shall look upon it; others are dependent upon the events of particular eras, and chiefly concern the generations that witness them. Of this latter class we understand the Apostle to speak when he says, "Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things though ye know them and be established in the present truth."

Every age of the world has had its present truth. On this point we need not particularize. It will be sufficiently illustrated by a reference to the days of Noah and of our Saviour. To the last generation of the antediluvians the preaching of a coming flood was emphatically present truth. In the years that immediately preceded and followed the commencement of the Christian era, the doctrine of a coming, and then of a crucified, risen and ascended, Saviour, was present truth.

The age in which we live, reader, has also its present truth. You and all the world, did they but know it, have a vital interest herein. It is, as it were, a concentration of all truth. Here the chains of prophecy all center, and here they terminate. It is this generation that is filling up at the same time its cup of iniquity, and every closing outline of probationary time which the inspired pencil has ever drawn; while the prophetic finger is pointing us to a final work of decision and judgment now being accomplished in the courts of heaven.

Should the eye of any to whom this seems strange language, rest upon these remarks; any who have not yet examined the subjects which are now, in outline, to claim our attention, we simply ask them to suspend for a while their judgment in the matter, and neither decide that we have taken a rash, fanciful, absurd or untenable position, till they have looked over with us, carefully though briefly, the evidences upon which it is based. It illy becomes any one in view of an eternity before us, the decisions of the great day, and the fact that truth alone will avail us then, to invent a theory and endeavor to bend the word of God to its support, or to labor for sectional prejudices or party interests; and it as illy becomes us, on the other hand, to pass carelessly by those things which may affect our eternal salvation.

Present truth is connected with the events of time. We have said that the present age has its present truth, paramount in importance to any that has preceded it. In order to show this, we must go back awhile upon the stream of time, and trace the more prominent events as noted in prophecy and recorded in history, to the present time. In this way we may ascertain the truth that especially concerns this age and generation with a certainty that knows no error.

Looking back upon the centuries that have rolled away in the past, we can trace with an accuracy that defies the cavilings of skepticism and infidelity, the hand of God, and the fulfillment of prophecy. Bancroft in his "History Discourses" thus eloquently speaks: "The prayer of the patriarch, when he desired to behold the Divinity face to face, was denied; but he was able to catch a glimpse of Jehovah, after he had passed by; and so it fares with our search for him in the wrestlings of the world. It is when the hour of conflict is over, that history comes to a right understanding of the strife, and is ready to exclaim, 'Lo! God is here, and we know it not.' At the foot of every page in the annals of nations may be written, 'God reigns.' Events as they pass away 'proclaim their original;' and if you will but listen reverently, you may hear the receding centuries, as they roll into the dim distances of departed time, perpetually chanting 'TE DEUM LAUDAMUS,' with all the choral voices of the countless congregation of the age."

And let none take the less interest in fulfillments of prophecy because they lie in the past; for the same God that sees the end from the beginning, and inspired his prophets to write concerning the events of the present, and the near future, moved them also to write concerning those. The stream is the same wherever we may take our stand in its course; and every prophecy that has been accomplished in the past is a living pledge that that which is yet future will as surely be fulfilled.