The Second Advent Manual

OBJECTIONS

Our object, however, in this article, is to direct your attention to the character of the objections to these calculations. If the calculations are so very “absurd” and “ridiculous,” it could be no very difficult thing for some of their able opposers to point out some mistake in the facts or dates on which they are based, or in the principles involved in the theory, without resorting to falsehood and slander, or at least without throwing away the most valuable labors of the old defenders of the Bible and Protestantism, or certainly without impeaching the Bible itself. TSAM 12.2

But we assert it, in the full expectation of speedily meeting the Judge of all the earth, that we do not know of a single writer who has opposed the doctrine, (and some of them we would not speak lightly of, as Christians, for our right hand,) who has not entirely omitted the only inquiry, which, in the very nature of the case, could amount to any thing, and apparently labored for the mastery in some one or all of the above fruitless, not to say wicked experiments. TSAM 12.3

No doubt they supposed they were doing God service, and that the cause they had undertaken to defend, demanded the best efforts which could be made for it; and as these were the only efforts they could make, it did not probably occur to them that they were doing evil that good might come, as they understood it, or that they were making concessions to the cause they opposed which must satisfy all candid spectators of the contest, that nothing could be fairly done against it. TSAM 13.1

We shall speak only of the objections brought against the calculation of the time. And yet not all of them against this, but against that view of it which brings the time so near; for many who pretend to object to “fixing the time,” as they call it, when the calculations which bring us to the end in ’43 are mentioned, go right on and make other calculations which put it off perhaps 20, 50, 100, or 1000 years “to come.” TSAM 13.2