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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Help with a mystery?

A Chicago newspaper ran the following on August 18, 1881. The article does not explain what the distubance actually was. Anyone in New Jersey interested enough to check the Newark newspapers for August 1881?

A New Sect
Special Dispatch to The Chicago Tribune

Pittsburgh, Pa., Aug. 17. – A New York telegram of yesterday gave some account of a sensation in a Newark (N. J.) church caused by the distribution of a tract entitled “Food for Thinking Christians – Why Evil was Permitted, and Kindred Topics.”

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't have the information you ask, but I haven't found a topic related with my next query:
I've read that the Pittsburgh newspapers informed that the night of the Memorial in 1878 some Bible Students went to a certain bridge in white robes waiting to be translated. In Faith on the March, Macmillan didn't deny this, but stated that Russell wasn't among those people. Do you have any references?

B. W. Schulz said...

Reports of various individuals and groups dressing in "white robes" or ascension robes are common in the press of that era. With one possilbe exception involving the followers of Thurman, these reports are uniformily false.

The Terry Island camp meeting in 1873 illustrates this. First hand accounts show no white robes connected to their wait for the Lord's appearing in 1873. They dressed in ordinary clothing.

Illustrations exist. See Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper for that year.

Reports of white robes in the Second Advent movement are almost always contrived by the press.