Birth of a Reformation, The Life and Labors of Daniel S. Warner

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[6] 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.