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Selected Messages Book 1
Looking down the stream of time to the last days, the same infinite
power proclaimed through John:
“These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the
key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and
no man openeth” (
Revelation 3:7
).
I was shown in vision, and I still believe, that there was a shut door
in 1844. All who saw the light of the first and second angels’ messages
and rejected that light, were left in darkness. And those who accepted
it and received the Holy Spirit which attended the proclamation of the
message from heaven, and who afterward renounced their faith and
pronounced their experience a delusion, thereby rejected the Spirit of
God, and it no longer pleaded with them.
Those who did not see the light, had not the guilt of its rejection.
It was only the class who had despised the light from heaven that the
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Spirit of God could not reach. And this class included, as I have stated,
both those who refused to accept the message when it was presented
to them, and also those who, having received it, afterward renounced
their faith. These might have a form of godliness, and profess to be
followers of Christ; but having no living connection with God, they
would be taken captive by the delusions of Satan. These two classes
are brought to view in the vision—those who declared the light which
they had followed a delusion, and the wicked of the world who, having
rejected the light, had been rejected of God. No reference is made to
those who had not seen the light, and therefore were not guilty of its
rejection.
In order to prove that I believed and taught the shut-door doctrine,
Mr. C gives a quotation from the Review of June 11, 1861, signed by
nine of our prominent members. The quotation reads as follows:
“Our views of the work before us were then mostly vague and
indefinite, some still retaining the idea adopted by the body of advent
believers in 1844, with William Miller at their head, that our work for
‘the world’ was finished, and that the message was confined to those
of the original advent faith. So firmly was this believed that one of our
number was nearly refused the message, the individual presenting it
having doubts of the possibility of his salvation because he was not in
‘the ‘44 move.’”
To this I need only to add, that in the same meeting in which it was
urged that the message could not be given to this brother, a testimony