Publisher's Preface
Year 1966
This volume, a reprint of the book originally published in 1921 and out of print for many years, is in response to a long felt need that this biography of D. S. Warner, along with a brief mention of a few of his associate ministers and gospel workers, should be available to the readers of the present generation and those to follow, should the Lord extend time.
The original book is herewith reproduced without alteration or change, except a very few minor omissions, and accounts of events and conditions existing after the period of Bro. Warner's life.
The reader should bear in mind that Bro. Warner's coming out of sectism was a gradual process over a period of time leading to the climactic step, and any improper or questionable action on his part while involved in sects was merely a result of his lack of clear light and understanding of God's Word. After the light broke through, he himself renounced these practices.
In 1878 D. S. Warner wrote: "The Lord ... gave me a new commission to join holiness and all truth together and build up the apostolic church of the living God."
Bro. Warner and his associates, discerning the impossibility of the true church existing within the framework of denominationalism, declared their freedom from the "sin of sectism and division" and instituted the "evening light" restoration movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century in direct fulfillment of Bible prophecy. See Zech. 14:7. These vital Bible truths, especially on the line of holiness and the nature of the church, which those reformers proclaimed, are imperative today in preserving the church after the apostolic pattern.
Many reformations have come to the religious world since the decline of the apostolic church from its pristine glory of the first century. Yet the nineteenth century reform is more complete, radical and fundamental than any previous movement. A historian has penned this significant observation: "No sooner had D. S. Warner and others begun to preach as men had not preached for time out of mind than men saw in their message the grandest truths the mind of man is capable of receiving. They saw the church built up by Christ, led and organized by the Holy Spirit, the names of whose members are in the Lamb's book of life, which takes the Scriptures as its only discipline, and fellowships every blood-bought soul. Here is real Christian unity.
"Despised and rejected in 'religious' circles, these men preached more real Bible truth in one sermon than one would expect in months of the ordinary kind. They preached profound truths; and it created a furor wherever they went. Thousands received Scriptural light. Many joyfully embraced the great truths they heard and spared neither pains nor money to spread the message everywhere."
In his book, "The Cleansing of the Sanctuary," Bro. Warner wrote thus on the subject of exclusiveness: "Christ is an exclusive Christ; there is none beside him. The faith that he gave us is an exclusive faith; no other saves the soul. The truth of God is exclusive in its nature; everything contrary to it is false. The kingdom of Christ is exclusive. It is a stone that breaks everything else to pieces. The one church that Jesus founded and named, and which is his own body, is also exclusive, for there is only 'one body in Christ.' During the reign of pagan persecution the rulers offered to stop the bloody martyrdom and allow the Christians to worship God in freedom, if they would confess that the pagan idols were also real Gods. This they could not do, but chose rather to die. And on this very point of exclusiveness is the present offense of the cross. People would not seriously object to God's ministers setting forth the church as contained in the Scriptures, if we would recognize their earth-born institutions as being also God's churches. But this we cannot do and be honest before God and faithful to his Word. "There is but one household of faith. Christ does not have a plurality of wives. He has but one bride, and she has no sisters. Thus saith her husband, 'My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother.' S. of Sol. 6:9."