CORRESPONDENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1922, Page 8

CORRESPONDENCE.

SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISTS. (To the Editor.) Sir, —Mr. David Neild has made some mis-statements in your issue of the 12th inst. concerning the Seventh Day Adventist’ Denomination which call for correction For instance, he says that we should call ourselves “Sixth Day Adventists.” Surely the members of a denomination should have the right, and should know better how to name themselves, than one outside its organisation. But, granting for he moment that Mr. Neild is in a position to tell us that we have incorrectly named ourselves, the basis of his contention is quite -erroneous. The fact is that the seventh day of the week in America is also the seventh day of the week in New Zealand, but being situated so far west of this portion of the planet, Amercian time is later than our time by about 18 hours.

It is quite true, as Mr. Neild asserts, that he has tried for more than a quarter of a century to place certain statements which he calls “facts” before this denomination, and that we have refused to acknowledge what he is pleased to call our “mistake.” The fact is we have persistently refused to follow Mr. Neild’s blunder, which he has been making for the last quarter of a century. We leave it for the public to judge who is right. All the civilised world calls Sunday—our Sunday—the first day of the week on all almanacs of Christendom. But Mr. Neild says all Christendom living east of an imaginary date line of his particular manufacture is wrong. All geographies agree on a date line in the Pacific. Mr. Neild contends that they are all wrong. At the Washing ton Meridian Conference held in 1884, the international date line was agreed to. Why does not Mr. Neild invite an international conference to re-consider this matter? He makes claims for his date line theory which have no foundation in reason or historical fact. There must be a date line somewhere. Mr. Neild admits this. Scientific men who have made a careful study of the question have settled the international date line. Seventh Day Adventists are not troubled in the least about the question, for it does not interfere in the least with their work. Mr. Neild is the one who is worried about it, so worried indeed that he can be so injudicious as to rush into print and accuse this denomination of “calling the sixth day of the week the seventh,” when every encyclopaedia, every calendar, and everybody except Mr. Neild, and a few of his disciples, call Saturday the sixth day of the week and Sunday the seventh day of the week.

This denomination does not ask men to “Down tools on Friday afternoon and all day Saturday without Divine authority,” as Mr. Neild accuses us of doing. Saturday is the seventh day of the week all over the world, as Mr. Neild very well knows. It would be a good thing for Mr. Neild to cease to bear false witness against his neighbors. He is out of joint with the calendar and the Bible. It would be well for him to find some legitimate proof for his contentions before attempting to lead your readers to infer that this denomination is lending assistance to the “go slow” policy, for from actual personal observation extending over thirty years, I am in a position to affirm that no body of people are more industrious than Seventh Day Adventists, for thousands of them are obliged to do the work of six days in five. Mr, Neild has labored hard to prove his contentions, and he has failed utterly because they are based upon false premises. We would take this opportunity of urging him to throw aside bis errors, and to use his energies in something more useful and edifying.—l am, etc., A. W. ANDERSON. Camp Meeting, New Plymouth.