ORGANIZATION or ORGANISM　

Now after all this, it was not long before the whole spirit and principle of General Conference Organization and affairs began to be reversed again. This spirit of reaction became so rife and so rank that some before the General Conference of 1903 at Oakland, Calif., two men, or three men, or four men, or a few men I should say, being together in Battle Creek or somewhere else, and without any kind of authority, but directly against the plain words of the Constitution, took it absolutely upon themselves to elect you president, and Brother Prescott vice-president of the General Conference. And then that there never was in this universe a clearer piece of usurpation of position, power, and authority. You two were then, of right, just as much president and vice-president of Timbuktu as you were of the Seventh-day Adventist General Conference.

But this spirit did not stop there. The thing done was directly against the Constitution. This was too plain to be escaped. And it was just as plain that with that Constitution still perpetuated in the coming General Conference, this usurpation of position, power and authority could not be perpetuated. What could be done to preserve the usurpation?-Oh, that was just as easy as the other. A new Constitution was framed to fit and to uphold the usurpation. This Constitution was carried to the General Conference of 1903 at Oakland Calif., and in every unconstitutional way, because in every truly constitutional government the constitution comes in some way from the people, not from the monarch. Thus the people make and establish a Constitution. The monarch grants a Constitution. When the people make a Constitution the people govern. When a monarch grants a Constitution, he seeks to please the people with a toy and keeps the government himself. This difference is the sole difficulty in Russia to-day; and the difference is simply the difference between monarch and government of the people; and between oppression and freedom. The people want to make a Constitution. The Czar wants to grant them a Constitution, and have them endorse anew his autocracy and bureaucracy by adopting the Constitution that he grants.

And this is just the difference between the General Conference and its Constitution of 1901 and the General Conference and its Constitution of 1903. In 1901 the monarchy was swept aside completely, and the Conference itself as such and as a whole made a new Constitution. In the General Conference of 1903 the usurpers of monarchial position and authority came with the Constitution that fitted and maintained their usurpation, and succeeded in getting it adopted. And how? -- None of the people had asked for a new Constitution. The General Conference delegation had asked for it. Not even the Committee on Constitution asked for it. In behalf of the usurpation it was brought before that Committee and advocated there, because, in very words, "The Church must have a visible head." It was not even then nor was it ever, favored by that Committee. It was put through the Committee, and reported to the Conference, only by permanently dividing the Committee,--a minority, of the Committee, opposing it all the time, and--a thing almost unheard of in Seventh-day Adventist's Conferences, a minority report against it. And when at last it was adopted by the final vote, it was by a slim majority of just five. And it was only by the carelessness of some of the delegates that it got through even that way; for there were just then downstairs in the Oakland Church enough delegates who were opposed to it, to have defeated it if they had been present.

They told this themselves afterwards. But they did not know that the vote was being taken, and by their not being in their places, the usurpation was sanctioned; the reactionary spirit that had been so long working for absolute control had got it; the principles and intent of the General Conference of 1901 was reversed; and a Czardom was enthroned which has since gone steadily onward in the same way and has with perfect consistency built up a thorough bureaucratic government, by which it reaches and meddles with, and manipulates, the affairs of all, not only of union and local conferences, but of local churches, and of individual persons. So that some of the oldest men in active service to-day, and who by their lives' experience are best qualified to know, have freely said that in the whole history of the denomination there has never been such a one-man power, such a centralized despotism, so much of Papacy, as there has been since the Oakland Conference (of 1903). And as a part of this bureaucracy there is, a Religious Liberty Bureau--a contradiction in terms.

Now when I was opposed to this thing before and in the General Conference of 1897, and before and in the General Conference of 1899, and before and in the General Conference of 1901, and before and in the General Conference of 1903, why should you be perplexed that I have not fallen in with it and helped to make it a success since 1903? Why should I in 1903, abandon all the principles and teachings by which I was right in opposing it, until and including 1903, when I was in the right all these years in opposing it, and in doing all that I could to keep it from succeeding, why and upon what principles should I have swung in and favored it just because at last in a most arbitrary, unconstitutional and usurping way it did at last succeed?

Again in the General Conference of 1901 you yourself said that in the principles of organization that I preached I had "light for the people." Those principles were the ones that prevailed in that Conference; and at your own suggestion these principles as preached in my first sermon, were published for the help of the denomination in the work of reorganization. But the principles and the form of organization of 1903 were directly the opposite of those that in 1901 you said were "light for the people." If my second sermon in the General Conference of 1901 had been printed along with the first, the people would have been able to see more plainly how entirely the course of things in 1903 was the reverse of that in 1901. And anyone can see it now by reading General Conference Bulletin of 1901, pp. 37-42, and 101-105.

Now brother, were those principles light in 1901? If so, then what did you do when you exposed the opposite of them in 1902, 1903? Or were those principles light in 1901, and darkness in 1903? Or were those principles really darkness in 1901 when you said that they were light. Or are they still light to-day as they were in 1901? And if in the General Conference of 1901 you were not able to distinguish between light and darkness, what surety has anybody that you were any more able to do in 1902-1903? Or is it possible that in 19021903 you were not, and now are not, able to see that the principles and the course of action of 1902-1903 are not the same as those of the General Conference of 1901? In other words, is it possible that you can think that certain principles with their course of action, and the reverse of them are one and the same? I know that the principles that in 1901 you said were "light for the people" were then really light, and they are now light and forever more will be light. They are only plain principles of the Word of God. I hold these principles to-day exactly as I did in 1901 and long before, and shall hold them forever. For this cause I was opposed to the usurpation and unconstitutional action of 1902-1903 that were the opposite of these principles; and shall always be opposed to them.

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