It is about 1870; the place, Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Allegheny, which later became a part of Pittsburgh, is a city of many churches. One evening a young man of eighteen is walking along one of Allegheny’s streets. By his own later admission, he had been “shaken in faith regarding many long-accepted doctrines” and had fallen “a ready prey to the logic of infidelity.” But tonight he is attracted by some singing. He enters a dusty, dingy hall. His object? In his own words, “to see if the handful who met there had anything more sensible to offer than the creeds of the great churches.”

The young man sat and listened. Jonas Wendell, a Second Adventist, delivered the sermon. “His Scripture exposition was not entirely clear,” our listener later remarked. But it did something. He had to admit: “It was sufficient, under God, to reestablish my wavering faith in the Divine inspiration of the Bible, and to show that the records of the Apostles and the Prophets are indissolubly linked. What I heard sent me to my Bible to study with more zeal and care than ever before.”

“We came to recognize,” wrote Russell, “the difference between our Lord as ‘the man who gave himself,’ and as the Lord who would come again, a spirit being. We saw that spirit-beings can be present, and yet invisible to men. . . . we felt greatly grieved at the error of Second Adventists, who were expecting Christ in the flesh, and teaching that the world and all in it except Second Adventists would be burned up in 1873 or 1874, whose time-settings and disappointments and crude ideas generally as to the object and manner of his coming brought more or less reproach upon us and upon all who longed for and proclaimed his coming Kingdom.”