MEETINGS IN NORTHERN MICH.
By Joseph Bates
DEAR BRO. WHITE: Since my last communication from Greenville I have been attending to some of the affairs of the church, endeavoring to relieve them from some burdens the enemy had imposed on them, and labor in the vicinity and hold another Sabbath meeting with them, which is now passed. After said meeting, we repaired to the water side and four others were buried with Christ in baptism. Two of whom, a brother and his wife, attended some of our meetings, decided and began with us to keep the Sabbath. While listening to our remarks the week before while we were addressing the candidates for baptism at the close of the meeting, giving them a few of our reasons why we could not in conscience baptize any person who persisted in the use of tobacco in any way, and if they then gave it up, and after baptism returned to the use of it again, they would have an additional responsibility to bear; the brother referred to was so deeply convicted about this matter that he resolved to renounce the use of it forever. Another one who had come some distance to learn our position for the first time, declared to one of the brethren that he would use it no more. Two others virtually acknowledged the same by going forward in baptism with the fourteen. One of the above mentioned four was a youth recently converted while keeping the Sabbath with his parents, and children of the family. His elder brother, a youth of eighteen years, the oldest of the family, who, his parents say, was an obedient child, and was forward also in advocating the duty of keeping the seventh-day Sabbath, suddenly and unexpectedly deserted his paternal home. The afflicted parents, after diligent inquiry, learned to their astonishment that the leading, influential minister of the place advised him to this, while some one or more of the leading members of his church supplied him with means, and thus together, as the afflicted father tells me, they accomplished their unnatural and wicked purpose. "Babylon is fallen! is fallen!" This afflicted father is the one referred to in my last communication who offers forty acres of his landed estate to the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association. Greenville, Mich., July 15, 1861.