spelled its own defeat. Miller simply said human chronology was defective and comforted the wavering with the assurance that after all "He yet would come." And so the remnant held together, patiently enduring the countrywide taunts of "When are you going up?" and "What will you take for your ascension robes now?"

In the hour of disillusion new leaders, not like the honestly mistaken William Miller, sprouted like so much poisonous fungus. Some set new dates and one, Joseph Turner of Maine, announced that Christ had come spiritually as a bridegroom, that the wise virgins (his followers) had gone in with Him to the marriage feast and that the door was shut behind them.

Turner, a man of infectious mesmeric power, persuaded a considerable number to adopt his theory in New England and New York. Elder Snow, who was responsible for the October 22 fiasco, pre-empted Turner's notion and set himself up as "Elijah the Prophet," damning all who would not believe him. Turner's sect practised feet-washing and kissing as enjoined by Scripture and professed to be immortal within the Kingdom that had come.

Out of Maine came two more "shut-door" apostles, man and wife, Elder James White and his bride, Ellen Harmon of Gorham. James was but an acolyte. Ellen was the prophet. A rock flung at her head in her childhood had flattened her nose and given her a penchant for visions. Sometimes she gazed in upon heaven; more often she peeped upon rebels or rivals in divers acts of secret sinning. Three diminuendo cries of "Glory!" brought on her trances from which she drew revelations ranging from keeping Saturday as the Sabbath to establishing a vegetarian diet and prescribing lined pants for her female adorers. She kept James busy writing down and publish

ing her various visions till one of them informed him he soon would die and he obliged. Ellen lived on to domineer her sect even to the day of her death in 1915 at the age of eighty-eight. In her prime she founded and lost a Battle Creek sanitarium that made corn palatable as a breakfast food and she amassed and dissipated a moderate fortune.

But neither Ellen nor James White-none of the ilk of Turner-can be counted with the direct line of the inheritors of Miller, who profited by his experience and evolved a simple, straightforward faith that would stand the test of limitless time.

Father Miller wrote his candid "Apology and Defense" and his followers accepted the principles they shared with him when they took the name of Adventists and organized their church in 1845. The Biblical prophecies were held intact; the attempt to fix a day of fulfillment was regarded as an inevitable error; and the entire future was declared the "tarrying time" with the coming of the Lord always imminent. The urgency of immediate repentance was preserved as the evangelizing force of Adventism. For the dead were believed to be sleeping till the Judgment morn when they would rise and with the living learn their fate forever more.

Once more the presses turned, the itinerants went forth and the Adventist revival became as incessant as the Methodist indeed surpassing it in later days because every Adventist pastor was his own evangel and concluded every service with an invitation to the penitent. Father Miller preached until he died in 1849 at the age of sixtyseven. Elder Joshua Himes, the Jonathan to David, was among the missionaries to Europe and the founder of three hundred pastorates in America during his ministry of forty

years. And Elder Luther Boutelle lived on into the nineties planting Adventist camp meetings all over the East.

The greatest permanent Gospel ground that Elder Boutelle helped to establish was dedicated in 1863 on the shores of Alton Bay on Lake Winnespesaukee in New Hampshire. It has been the faith's most strategic spot. Every year New Englanders are still being converted on the wooded plateau and led down the slope to be dipped in the waters which the Indians of old called the "Smile of the Great Spirit.”

T

CHAPTER XIII

GARNERING BY IMMERSION

Savior! Thy dying love
Thou gavest me;

Nor should I aught withhold,
Dear Lord, from Thee.

In love my soul would bow,

My heart fulfill its vow,
Some offering bring Thee now,
Something for Thee.

Baptismal Hymn.

HROUGHOUT their long history the Baptists have been overflowing with their message. John

Bunyan languished a dozen years in Bedford Jail for persisting in preaching the faith that drove Roger Williams out of the Colony on Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims landed for "freedom to worship God," and into the arms of fortunately friendly Indians on the Narragansett shore. "What cheer?" a feathered chieftain shouted from the rocky marge where some day Providence should stand and come to know a laundry by his very words. And the zealous exile might have answered in a voice the wooded hills re-echoed "Repent and be baptized!"

But the Reverend Roger did not dip his own flock or his aboriginal brethren till eight years later when, returning from a voyage to England in 1644, he brought over the Scriptural interpretation prescribing consecration by

immersion. Ever after, from icy stream to marble baptistery, in this way the faith was signified by all Baptists, Particular or General, Primitive or Free-Will, SeventhDay or Separatist. And others followed them into the water. The Methodists permitted it. The Adventists, Campbellites and Pentcostalites required it. But it was the Baptists who led the way through Jordan.

Roger Williams was a Particular Baptist, of the hyperCalvinist branch that had been almost overwhelmed by the Arminian General Baptists when Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, neither of them Baptists, achieved a triumph for Calvinism in the Great Awakening. From this revival the Particulars had a resurgence of strength, centering in their Philadelphia Association, formed in 1752, that swept southward into the Carolinas and northward into New England and won over the Separatist churches set up by the satellites of Whitefield.

Though they benefited by the revivaling of others, the Baptists themselves, with the exception of the ardent FreeWill family, looked askance at all human efforts to regenerate man as presumptuous and inconsistent with the supreme sovereignty of the God of Calvin. It was reasoned for almost a century that the salvation of sinners was determined by divine electing grace, that mortal efforts were needless and useless and that the true power and glory of the Baptist Church lay in "being still."

Towards 1830 the calm waters began to be rippled. Baptist pastors started going beyond their pulpits. Then the evangelists emerged from among them and the flood tide rolled in and wet the feet of the Canutes of the Baptist communion. Jacob Knapp and Jabez Swan let it loose and kept it flowing for fifty years. Knapp converted one hundred thousand souls. Swan waded in and baptized