A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath and the Commandments of God: With a Further History of God's Peculiar People from 1847-1848Bates, Joseph
Religion
A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath and the Commandments of God: With a Further History of God's Peculiar People from 1847-1848
Bates, Joseph
Sabbath; Seventh-Day Adventists -- Doctrinal and controversial works
_Dear Sir_,—The time was, when all second advent believers were dear to
you, and they called you father and brother Miller. Alas, how changed the
scene is now! Jesus says “whosoever shall do the will of my Father which
is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother.” They can’t
believe that you are doing the will of God, as you once was, though they
cannot help loving and venerating your name for the great light which you
have given—because you are wounding their feelings by calling them
Fanatics, Door-Shutters, and almost any thing but honest people, to
destroy all their reputation and christian fellowship, and make them feel
if possible, that they are worse than the heathen. In this way you have
weaned their affection from you, and when you give them an exposition of
God’s word now, they doubt: say they, he first gave us the light, and we
rallied to his standard, because it agreed with the scriptures—but when we
were come to the most trying and toilsome part of our journey then he
forsook us and joined in with the shepherds and those of like faith, to
berate us. But we soon learnt from the prophets that there would be a
people in the last days, answering this description, that God had promised
to save, called _Outcasts_!—Jer. xxx: 17; Psl. cxlvii: 2. Now you are
encouraging these same deniers of our faith to be _peaceable_; for—say
you—we shall soon get into the kingdom of God. Methinks if we should all
meet there under existing circumstances, there would be a great deal of
confessing before we could be reconciled to listen to each other’s joys.
But it will not be so; if you and your brethren, and the _outcasts_ too,
are saved, then I predict that we shall have to stay here until a perfect
reconciliation takes place. When that will be, I cannot tell, for in my
judgment the gulf between us has been widening for the last three years.
Now, I prefer to remain on that side of it with the _Outcasts_, for they
have the promise that they shall be gathered. When we made our sacrifice
during a cry at midnight, we considered and were fully persuaded that we
were doing our last work, and surely that would _be done the best of any
work_. Then of course we had no right whatever to take back the sacrifices
we then made, and rob God. We were fully aware that our disappointments
would not change our course, for if we were ever saved it must be by our
onward course. But those with whom you were associated sounded the
retreat, and all that did not follow in their train have been subject to
your unsparing epithets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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