There was something about the manner in which the Sabbath made its way from Seventh Day Baptists to the future Seventh-day Adventists that resembled fire making its way along a fuse to a barrel of gunpowder.
Mrs. Oakes passed it to Frederick Wheeler and a handful of Washington Adventists. Wheeler preached it without very much effect at the time and (apparently) passed it on to Thomas M. Preble.
Preble wrote about it in the Hope of Israel for February 1845--a paper edited, by the way, by the same Joseph Turner who in December 1844 discovered the same truth that Edson and Ellen did about waiting for Christ's return from the wedding.
As soon as he was able, Preble revised his article and republished it as a tract entitled, fittingly enough, Tract Showing That the Seventh Day Should Be Observed as the Sabbath. He concluded his message vigorously using a lot of capitals and italics. "Thus we see Daniel 7:25 fulfilled, the 'little horn' changing 'times and laws.' Therefore it appears to me that all who keep the first day of the week for 'the Sabbath' are Pope's Sunday Keepers!! and GOD'S SABBATH BREAKERS!!!"
The article and the tract got results. One or the other may have been the reason why J.B. Cook, a Millerite theologian, advocated the Sabbath for a few years. A copy of the tract definitely found its way to Paris, Maine, where it convinced several people, including the family of Edward Andrews, and that was something, as we shall see. A copy of the article was also read by that sea captain turned Millerite leader, Joseph Bates. And through his exertions the fire fairly flamed along the fuse.
Bates was nothing if not a man of action. Immediately he dropped everything he was doing and searched the Bible. He made his way 140 miles by coach, rail, and foot--perhaps entirely by foot--to Hillsboro to meet with Frederick Wheeler, arriving late, waking up his family, and studying with him the rest of the night. (Wheeler's son, George, would tell of that night as long as he lived.) Next morning, Bates and Wheeler went on to Washington and talked about the Sabbath till noon with some of the Farnsworths under a stand of maple trees. Then Bates turned back to his home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. On the way he wrestled with the effects a change to the Sabbath on his part might have on his neighbors, family, and friends. "What is that to thee? Follow thou me" rang relentlessly in his ears.
Crossing the bridge between New Bedford and Fairhaven, Bates made his first convert out of one of his Adventist friends. "What's the news, Captain Bates?" asked James Madison Monroe Hall. "The news," replied the captain, "is that the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord our God." Hall kept the very next seventh day as the Sabbath.
So much for 1845. The Seventh Day Baptists may not have been very evangelistic about the Sabbath, but Joseph Bates was a former sea captain, a natural leader by definition. He was an Adventist, besides, eager to help people get ready to meet the Lord. He could never imagine, he once said, "that our glorious Commander designed that we should leave our sacrifices smoking on the altar of God, In the midst of the enemies' land, but rather that we should be pushing onward from victory to victory."
In 1846 he read Crosier's article in the Day-Star Extra of February 7 and was convinced that the sanctuary to be cleansed is in heaven and is as real a temple as the new Jerusalem itself. He sat down and wrote a companion piece, a tract entitled, "The Opening Heavens," In which he added further evidence from astronomy and the Bible. Not content, he traveled all the way to Port Gibson to compare notes with Edson, Crosier, and Hahn, and made Sabbath keepers out of all of them.
In the meantime, he wrote his most famous tract, "The Seventh Day Sabbath, A Perpetual Sign." God blessed the sacrifice and scholarship that went into that little work. It made numerous converts to the Sabbath, among whom were James and Ellen White, who accepted its message shortly after their marriage on August 30, 1846.
In view of all this and of his later labors, Joseph Bates may rightly be considered the father of the Sabbath truth among Seventh-day Adventists--a people who today count millions of Sabbath keepers around the world.
Let us pause and get acquainted with Joseph Bates. [1]
What a man he was! Intrepid, inventive, indefatigable, disciplined, dedicated, colorful, and kind. Patriarch of the Seventh-day Adventist pioneers, he traveled more and was ill far less than any of the other founders of the church. He lived till he was 80.
Bates was born in 1792 only a dozen miles from the sights, sounds, and smells of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a port fast becoming the whaling center of the world.
Inevitably he took to the waves at 15 as a cabin boy. His father hoped he would have an unpleasant time and quit. He had a very unpleasant time but kept right on. During his first voyage he fell from the rigging into the Atlantic but was rescued before a shark, seeking food on the other side of the ship, could make a meal of him.
On his second trip, while ashore at Liverpool, he was impressed into the Royal Navy under a brutal British practice which helped to precipitate the war with America in 1812. Five years to the day passed before he was released. Half of that time he spent as a sailor at sea and half as a prisoner on a man-of-war or at dread Dartmoor Prison. Several times he attempted escape over his ship's side or through its hull, but every time was foiled.
Free again, he made ten voyages between 1815 and 1828, advancing through second mate and first mate to captain of his crew and part owner of his ship. In 1818, between trips, he married his childhood sweetheart, Prudence Nye.
His life was ever adventurous. Checking the anchor chains once in his days as a crewman, he saw sheet ice form suddenly all around his rowboat and carry him in gathering darkness out to sea. His captain read the burial service for him!
On another occasion, returning with a heavy cargo of iron from Europe and only three short days from home, his ship was engulfed in a most ferocious and extended tempest. The vessel was driven back into the Atlantic for weeks, while lengthy sea grasses and enormous barnacles flourished on her hull, severely retarding her progress. Seven times his captain hailed passing ships to beg for water and other provisions. Joseph Bates believed until he died that the prayer of the black cook, the first prayer he ever heard on shipboard, was one reason that they reached home at last.
One by one, five children (the first died in infancy) were added to the Bates's home; at the same time, liquor, wine, profanity, and tobacco were one by one resolutely subtracted from Joseph's personal way of life. He became more thoughtful about salvation. Prudy (as he called his wife) placed a New Testament in his seaman's chest. The Good Book deeply impressed the captain. At first, depressed about his soul, he thought of jumping overboard. On shore in South America he climbed a tree to be safe from snakes and prayed aloud. Peace was stealing in, but complete confidence in God still eluded him.
Back home in Fairhaven he introduced regular family worship and started attending church. In his boyhood, before going to sea, he had given his heart to God and happily attended prayer meetings. That experience was now long in the past and he was starting over anew. All at once his fears departed and joy came in with a rush. "My tongue was loosed to praise God. ... All doubts and darkness respecting my conversion and acceptance with God, passed away like the morning dew, and peace like a river, for weeks and months occupied my heart and mind."
Aboard ship in these better days he entreated God in writing, "Use me O Lord, I beseech Thee, as an instrument of Thy service; number me among Thy peculiar people."
In years to come, this prayer was to be marvellously fulfilled. On the day of his baptism he began to organize a temperance society, one of the first in America. On his final voyage, which followed immediately, he ordered his men, strangers from Boston, to avoid all profanity, to refrain entirely from alcohol, and to keep the Sabbath (which to him at that time, of course, meant Sunday). They enjoyed the least quarrelsome trip of their careers. Soon forty and then seventy-five other ships from New Bedford and Fairhaven were following the example set by Bates and his men.
In 1828, after twenty-one years at sea, Joseph Bates retired from sailing and sold out. He had promised Prudence he would stay home when he had saved $10,000. It appears he had achieved his goal. There was another factor. He wanted more opportunities to witness for the Lord. While he developed a silk farm and sold real estate, he became an active member of the local Christian Connection church and of several reform societies, including an antislavery (abolitionist) group.
But just as his silk farm was coming into production, he heard his first Millerite sermon and at once cast himself with everything he had into the advent movement. Having worked with J.V. Himes in temperance causes in the 1820s, he was quickly drawn into the leadership of the Adventist people. He chaired one of their general conferences.
In 1843 Bates joined hands with H.S. Gurney, a rugged blacksmith with a fine singing voice, for an evangelistic tour to Kent Island off the coast of Maryland. By this time he had abandoned abolitionism, believing the second coming to be the only effective answer to slavery. He wanted now to lead the bondsmen to freedom in Christ. But the slave owners greeted him with suspicion. "I understand you are an abolitionist," said one, "and have come to get our slaves."
"I have indeed come to get your slaves--and you too!" replied Bates. "I want you all to be saved."
A heckler interrupted a meeting and threatened to rouse a mob and ride him and Gurney out of town on a fence rail.
Bates responded lightly, "If you will put a saddle on it, we would rather ride than walk." His audience laughed and made the heckler sit down. Bates and his "singing evangelist" proceeded to draw many converts from blacks and whites alike.
Before the spring of 1844, he sold his farm and real estate, settled his debts against the coming of his Lord, and proceeded to give virtually all the remainder of his fortune to the cause. When Prudence protested that he was imprudent, he confidently replied, "The Lord will provide." Though the Lord did not come as expected, He did indeed provide for the Bates family, often in unexpected ways.
Tuesday, October 22, 1844, found Joseph almost penniless, and without his only son. Choosing to follow his dad's youthful adventures rather than his religious convictions, fourteen-year-old Joseph, Jr., put to sea on a whaling ship on Monday, October 21. In his twenties young Joseph was to be injured by a whale; in his thirties, to die at sea.
The day after the disappointment found Captain Bates deeply embarrassed. As a highly respected member of the community he had urged his neighbors to prepare for the second coming. Now they taunted him in the streets until he wished the ground would open up and swallow him.
He soon got over that, however, and counted himself among the Adventists who hoped their calculations were wrong and that Jesus would yet come soon. We have already seen what occupied part of his time in 1845 and 1846. He accepted the Sabbath from Preble and the Bible and the new light about the sanctuary discovered by Edson, Crosier, and Hahn. He became convinced late in 1846 that Ellen White was a true prophet. He then went on to become, with James and Ellen White, one of the top three leaders in the emerging Seventh-day Adventist movement.
Accustomed to endless travel on the high seas, Bates the seafarer continued to rove. Until 1852 he sought to bring the new light to Millerites from Maine to Michigan; after that he traveled still farther afield, witnessing to any who would listen, from stragglers by the roadside to a governor (W.H. Crapo, of Michigan) in his mansion. Trains then seemed like airplanes today. He used them at times, handing out tracts to the passengers. Sometimes he walked; it was cheaper, and he could meet more people that way. Sometimes, having no money for the fare, he was forced to walk.
Often he tramped many long miles through snow to look up a single family. On various occasions he arrived in time to pray for a seriously ill child and see it healed. Once, after months on the road, he returned to Fairhaven, only to be off again to visit the "scattered flock" after a single weekend! (Mrs. Bates for many years had the companionship of her widowed mother and then of a married daughter.)
Although able to hold large crowds spellbound, Bates's normal procedure was to address small groups in churches, public schools, or farmhouses. Interested people invited their neighbors from the country miles around and provided Bates a place to sleep a night or two--then often counted a few new Sabbath keepers as the consequence of his call.
Weather was but a slight deterrent to this man who had faced ocean storms. When he was sixty-five, he baptized seven people in a river, standing in a hole cut through three feet of ice. The temperature was thirty degrees below zero.
Blessed with natural energy and tactfulness and almost thirty years the senior of James White, Bates was chosen to chair most of the more important conferences held by Sabbath-keeping Adventists, a practice that lasted until the formal organization of the General Conference in May 1863. Thus the captain continued in command.
The reformer also continued to reform. To the improvements in his way of life that he made in the 1820s, he had added by 1844 the rejection of tea, coffee, meat, and rich desserts. Preferring to witness by example, Bates said little about his diet in public until Ellen White's health reform vision of 1863. After that he spoke more freely on the subject.
As people looked at him, they were constrained to listen! Sick but a few brief times in his entire life, he could say at seventy-nine, "I am entirely free from aches and pains!"
James White, who was himself rarely free from aches and pains, could say of Bates, "He stood straight as a monument and would walk the sidewalks as lightly as a fox."
Having disciplined himself as a ship's officer to maintain a continuous log about his craft and crew, Bates was able in spite of his incessant travels to send hundreds of reports and articles flowing into the Review office. Subscribers, many of whom he personally had baptized, thanked him for them.
This ability of his as a writer brings us back to where we started. Bates, the devout Sunday-keeping captain became a yet more devout Sabbath-keeping Adventist. And, as we have seen, it was a booklet that he wrote in 1846 called The Seventh Day Sabbath, A Perpetual Sign that won James and Ellen White, and many others, to the Sabbath. In 1855 he told J. N. Loughborough an experience he had while writing one of his three books on the Sabbath. It is a famous story and well worth retelling.
Prior to the development of western silver mines in the 1870s, silver was a scarce commodity in the United States, and English and Spanish coins were in common use. When the event in this story occurred, Bates's cash reserves were reduced to a single York shilling. Let us reconstruct the story as if he were telling it himself: [2]
"While I was praying one day, the conviction came over me that I ought to write a book about the Sabbath and that God would provide the means. So I seated myself at my desk with my Bible and concordance at hand and began to work. After about an hour Mrs. Bates came and said, 'joseph, I don't have flour enough to make out the baking.'
" 'How much do you lack?' I asked.
" 'About four pounds,' she replied.
"I went out and purchased the flour, brought it home, and sat down once more at my desk. Soon Mrs. Bates came in again and exclaimed, 'Where did this flour come from?'
" 'Why,' I asked, 'isn't there enough?'
" 'But I don't understand,' she said. 'Have you, Captain Bates, a man who sailed vessels out of New Bedford to all parts of the world, been out and bought four pounds of flour?'
"Up to this date Mrs. Bates [who was not yet a Sabbath keeper] did not know my true financial condition. Recognizing that I must now acquaint her with it, I said calmly, 'Wife, I spent for this food the last money I had on earth.'
"Mrs. Bates began to sob bitterly and asked, 'What are we going to do?'
" I stood to my feet as if I were a captain still directing my vessel and said, 'I am going to write a book and spread the Sabbath truth before the world.'
" 'But what are we going to live on?'
" 'The Lord will open the way.'
" 'Oh, The Lord will open the way! The Lord will open the way!' That's what you always say.' And bursting into tears, she left the room.
"I went on writing for about half an hour, when an impression came over me to go to the post office. I went, and sure enough there was a letter--but with the five-cent postage not paid. It humbled me to tell the postmaster, Mr. Drew, a friend of mine, that I did not have even five cents, but he was kind and said, 'Take it along, and pay some other time.'
" 'No,' I replied, 'I won't take the letter until the postage is paid. I'm of the opinion, however,' I went on, 'that there is money in it. Would you please open it? If there is money there, take the postage out first.'
"The postmaster complied--and found a ten-dollar bill. It was from a person who said the Lord had so impressed his mind that Captain Bates needed money that he had sent it to me immediately.
"With a light heart I then went to a provision store, bought a barrel of flour for $4.00, and some potatoes, sugar, and other necessary things. When I explained where the groceries should be delivered, I warned, 'Probably the woman will say they don't belong there, but don't you pay any mind. Unload the goods on the front porch.'
"I then went to Benjamin Lindsey, the printer, and arranged for publishing my book on the understanding that I would pay for the work as fast as I received money, and that the books would not be mine until the bill was paid in full.
"I knew that no one owed me anything, but I felt that it was my duty to write the book and that God would move on people to send the means. I bought some paper and pens in order to give time for the groceries to get home ahead of me. Then I went on, entered the house quietly by the back door, and sat down again at my work. Soon Mrs. Bates came into my study and said excitedly, 'Joseph, look on the front porch! Where did that stuff come from? I told the drayman it didn't belong here, but he insisted on unloading it.'
" 'Well,' I said, 'I guess it's all right.'
" 'But where did it come from?'
" 'The Lord sent it.'
" 'The Lord sent it. The Lord sent it, That's what you always say!'
"I handed her the letter I had received. She read it and had another cry, but a very different one from the first. And then she sweetly asked for my forgiveness for her lack of faith.
"And the money did come in, sometimes from persons I never met. In fact, the final amount that we needed--I never found out where it came from--arrived on the very day that the books were finished."
Although Joseph Bates never found out where that final payment came from, J.N. Loughborough, in 1884, found out. He learned that H.S. Gurney, Joseph Bates's singing blacksmith friend of the Kent Island trip, had provided it. When Gurney had set out on that journey, his employer had fired him and angrily refused to pay him his back wages that were due. Now, just in time, the Lord led the employer to relent. [3]
God's providence in helping Captain Bates spread the word about the Sabbath in 1846 and 1847 strengthened early Sabbath-keeping Adventists in their sometimes sorely tested belief that God was indeed with them.
The fuse had ignited the gunpowder. A radiant new light about God's holy day was bursting upon them!
Notes: