CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Momentum Increases as Conferences Progress

Throughout the series of General Conferences the plan was followed of having only a few chosen speakers. These were leading, representative men, selected to speak for the Millerite movement, voicing its fundamental positions, and setting forth its spirit and basic objectives. The personnel of these conferences was made up of clergymen representing the various sections and churches within the area who had espoused the Millerite positions. There were consequently no more responsible and authoritative voices than those who gave the main addresses, and no more authoritative statements of faith than the united declarations of these assemblages of their leading men. They constituted the dependable voice of the movement, and their public presentations supersede in authoritativeness all individual expressions of belief.PFF4 582.1

The second, or Lowell, conference will be considered more fully than some that follow, because after this second report in book form, the rest of the reports were confined largely to brief presentations appearing in the Signs of the Times and other papers. The foundations were laid in these united gatherings. These two, in book form, performed a major task and brought the movement impressively before the public, particularly before the religious leadership of the land. Here we can find the temperature, pulse, and respiration, as it were, of this movement, now rapidly growing in size and momentum.PFF4 582.2