A Modern Pentecost

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 15, 1864

A Modern Pentecost.

THE following is the opening paragraph of the description of the late Sanitary Fair, in Brooklyn, N. Y., copied from the N. Y. Independent. With such a kind of pentecost, which consists of a "most remarkable outburst of popular jollity," the church of the present day is satisfied. Read the description of a primitive pentecost, Acts ii, and mark the contrast.

"Notwithstanding it is the season of Lent, when pious Catholics and good Episcopalians religiously abstain from all festive gatherings, except on mi careme, the City of Churches, during the past week, has been the scene of a most remarkable outburst of popular jollity, in which all sects, denominations and conditions have taken part. It has been a sort of pentecostal gathering, wherein Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and Moravians forgot all their differences, and, moved by the human instincts of patriotism and benevolence, poured into one common reservoir their thank-offerings, from the rich gift of the opulent merchants of the Hights to the widow's mites of the alleys and by-ways. No lovelier, soul-satisfying spectacle was ever witnessed on this earth. So far as we can see, there has been no base alloy mingled with this golden display of what is best and beautiful in humanity."