Memoirs of William Miller - Sylvester Bliss

made us purify ourselves from our sectarian
prejudices and bigotry.
“I have often thought that we then enjoyed a
foretaste of the love and fellowship of the saints in
light. Why is it not so now? The reason is as
obvious as the sun at noonday. We have been
drawn from our first principles by wicked and
designing men, who have crept in among us and
drawn us into parties, to follow men instead of
God, and to form new tests instead of the Bible.
Some of our lecturers first began the confusion, by
declaring an unholy crusade against the sects,
which brought in men of blood instead of men of
peace. True, after the manner of men, the sects had
provoked us to the course we took by all the
wicked arts and misrepresentation of our views and
motives that human and satanic agency could
invent, -- by slanders, ridicule, and wresting the
Word of God from the meaning which had long
been laid down in their own creeds, and departing
from those rules by which their fathers, for
centuries, had applied mystic Babylon to the
church of Rome. We were not called, in my
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