"Daddy, could I be baptized tonight? Please?" "It's already late, you know, Ophelia, and we have twelve miles to ride in an open sleigh before you can get to bed!"
"I know, Daddy; but I really would like to be baptized before we go home."
"Do you realize that the lake is probably frozen around the edges, and that we would have to travel two or three cold miles there and back?"
"Yes; but that's all right," the girl responded. "I can take it."
Seeing her resolution, a minister in the group turned to a friend and asked, "Elder, would you mind going out to the lake with Ophelia and her father and baptizing her?"
"I'd be glad to do it," the good man replied. And thereupon Hiram Edson accompanied his twelve-year old daughter to the icy water, witnessed her baptism in the dark, and arrived home at a very late hour, chilled through no doubt, but very happy in the Lord. [1]
This incident, which happened at the close of a revival in 1855, eleven years after the great disappointment, introduces Hiram Edson to us as a devout Christian father. He had six children all together, counting one who died as an infant. At this same revival Edson was ordained, apparently as a local elder--which introduces him to us as an active Christian layman. For many years after the disappointment, for as many as his health permitted, Edson explored new truth, sacrificed to publish it, and traveled to spread it. In the early 1850s he accompanied Joseph Bates, John Andrews, John Loughborough, and a number of other ministers, tirelessly seeking interested prospects, often covering hundreds of miles, frequently on foot, usually in winter. Summers he farmed to pay expenses. Twice he sold a farm, once a flock of sheep, to help the cause. When he grew old, he was awarded ministerial credentials. He died in 1882. [2]
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Edson's first wife died in 1839, when he was thirty-two. To provide her three little children with a new mother, he soon brought another Mrs. Edson to his farm near Port Gibson, New York (a landing on the Erie Canal). In 1843 the advent message came to Rochester, some thirty miles distant. Soon it spread to Port Gibson. Edson, a Methodist at the time, accepted it during an evangelistic series.
On the same night that this series closed, Edson was impressed by what seemed an audible voice telling him to go to the home of a dying neighbor and heal him in the name of the Lord. This troubled him, for he thought that miracles of healing ended in Bible times. Unable, however, to shake off the conviction, he entered his friend's house late at night. Edson made his way by candlelight to the bedside, laid his hands on the sick man, and said, "Brother, the Lord Jesus makes you whole." To Edson's great joy, the man sat up at once, threw back the blankets, swung his feet to the edge of the bed, and walked around the room praising God. Soon all the rest of the family were up, praising God. [3]
That very same evening Edson heard a voice telling him, "Go talk the [advent] truth to your neighbors and fellowmen." He thought it even harder to witness than to help heal! He struggled for days. But when he at last surrendered, he, like William Miller, found that God could make good use of him. He visited homes all day, assisted with meetings at night, and soon saw three or four hundred of his neighbors and fellowmen accept Jesus and join the advent movement.
Thus occupied, he and his family came up to October 22. As that fateful day wore on into night, and the relentless ticking of the clock warned that time was running out, we can be sure that they and the friends who had joined them for the occasion earnestly reviewed the evidences for their faith: the 2300 days stretching from the fall of 457 BC to the fall of 1844; the advent awakening as a fulfillment of the first and second angels' messages; the "tarrying time" after the spring disappointment, and the "midnight cry" at the camp meeting in August; and especially Samuel Snow's clear exposition of the cleansing of the sanctuary in the light of the Day of Atonement.
Today, they told themselves, October 22, the "tenth day of the seventh month," Jesus was completing his final work of atonement in the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary and without doubt would yet leave that place and come to earth to bless His waiting people.
"We confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with Him," Edson wrote later, "and that His voice would call up Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the ancient worthies, and near and dear friends which had been torn from us by death. ... Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled twelve at midnight."
As the timepiece chimed the hour, Edson's family and friends, like Millerites everywhere, counted the beats with rapidly sinking hearts. When nothing could be heard but the doleful rhythm of its steady tick, they knew that "the day had then passed" and their "disappointment became a certainty." Said Edson, "Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. ... We wept, and wept, till the day dawn."
But as the hours continued to pass, Edson found his mind reviewing the ways in which God had blessed him since he had accepted the advent hope. He had been given the power to heal in Christ's name; he had seen hundreds of lives changed for the better; he had enjoyed a wonderful peace. His confidence began to return. "Let us go to the barn," he said to the men who were still at his house. And in the cool gray of that late October dawning a group of common men, baffled but still struggling to believe, entered the granary, shut the door, and knelt to pray. "We continued in earnest prayer until the witness of the Spirit was given that our prayer was accepted, and that light should be given, our disappointment be explained, and made clear and satisfactory.
"No explanation came just at that time; but a certainty sprang up in their hearts that God is love, and that though they did not understand what had happened, He would make it plain someday.
Feeling better, they filed back into the kitchen and ate breakfast. Edson suggested to one of his friends, O.R.L. Crosier evidently, that they visit some of the Millerite neighbors whom they had helped win to Christ, so that they could encourage them with their own new confidence. Perhaps to save time they took a shortcut across a field of corn standing in shocks.
While passing through the cornfield, Edson tells us, "I was stopped about midway of the field. Heaven seemed open to my view, and I saw distinctly and clearly, that instead of our High Priest coming out of the Most Holy of the heavenly sanctuary to come to this earth (on October 22], ... that he for the first time entered on that day the second apartment of that sanctuary; and that he had work to perform in the Most Holy before coming to this earth."
So simple; yet it rates among the most dramatic moments in religious history.
Abraham was but a nomad cattle herder when God called him to father His chosen people.
Daniel received his special calf as a youthful captive in a foreign land. Jesus was an itinerant rabbi in a remote Roman province when His death saved the world.
Cleopas was an almost unknown disciple when Christ gave him Bible insights that led to the foundation of the Christian church.
And Hiram Edson, Adventism's "cornfield Cleopas," was an upstate New York farmer--and a devoted, Bible-studying, soul-winning layman--when God gave him an understanding of Christ's heavenly ministry that was brand-new in the history of theology. In a very special sense the Seventh-day Adventist Church was born at that moment, in that field, as that farmer contemplated Christ.
Notes: