E. D. SEXTON and 1914
(Investigator 219, 2024 November) The 19th century books and magazines of Jehovah's Witnesses contain many predictions for specific dates. For example:
And with the end of A.D. 1914, what God calls Babylon, and which men call Christendom, will have passed away...
(Studies in the Scriptures, Volume III 1891, p. 153) For a century after the predictions failed regular statements were published that implied the prophecies were accurate but without explicitly stating this. For example: "history confirms that Jehovah's witnesses were the only Christian group found awake as to 1914…" (Watchtower 1960, p. 433) What the sect believed before 1914 can be checked, aside from its books and magazines, in the convention reports that the sect published yearly from 1904 onwards. In these reports many speeches at conventions were summarized and some published in full. A prominent elder and speaker was E.D. Sexton. A photo, in the 1913 convention report, shows him on ministry "in the mountains of the west". At a 1913 convention Sexton said to the audience:
Dear friends, you know we are getting so near the time when the clock
is going to strike 1914 that some of us might waver a little, and begin
to say, Well, I do not know, it was all right about thinking of 1914
when it was a long way off, but now when it is real close, it is
different. I know just how you feel. I will tell you how it came to me
at first. I said to myself, you had better not talk so much about 1914,
because it is getting close to that date. If you want to have the
approval of the friends all along the line, and don't like to have them
say, Well, Sexton said so and so, you had better keep quiet about 1914,
because if it is not so and so, they will say you are not as good a
prophet as you thought you were.
When I found myself wavering in this way, I commenced to talk more about 1914 than in all the years previous. And if October, 1914, comes and things do not happen as we think they are going to happen, why I am coming around just as cheerful as ever, and we will try 1915. But I do not anticipate that my dear friends. I expect that the Lord's people are going home pretty soon… Yes, 1914 will soon be here and we shall all go home… Now, Jesus did come in 1874, and forty years from 1874, October, would bring you where? Nineteen hundred and fourteen. And what will happen? The overthrow of the antitypical Jerusalem. (International Bible Students Souvenir Convention Report 1913, pp 102-103) "Going home" meant going to heaven, similar to the "rapture" that some religions teach now. And "antitypical Jerusalem" meant all the other religions and governments in Christendom, their "overthrow" in 1914 a part of Armageddon. (BS)
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