Our New Volume

With this issue the, CONSERVATOR opens a new volume, and we trust that the new volume will be an improvement over all that have preceded it. For nineteen years the paper has been to the church the conservator of its rights, its peace, its purity and its fundamental principles, and it has brought into the homes of the church each week an ac-count of the church's work and pro-gress; a number of communications on important matters from the church’s ablest and best writers and thinkers; a discussion of the Sunday-school lessons; a selection of the best things that could be found in its exchanges and else-where for the use of the family; thebest things that have been written and printed on the moral reforms of the day; a record of the triumphant deaths of our people, and three pages of editorial mat- ter containing the best thoughts and the richest experiences of the men who have occupied the editorial chair. During the greater part of this period it has also contained material of the highest grade for the special use and benefit of our young people's organiza-tions; of our pastors and of the mothers in our homes, besides much other choice matter on moral and. religious subjects for the encouragement and the quicken- ing of the spiritual life of its readers. And we are glad to know that in many of our homes and to many of its readers it has become and continues to be a benediction and a necessity—a messenger whose coming is as the coming of a very dear friend. Possibly there are none of its readers but have found some thing in it not to their liking, while others have sometimes not found in it what they expected and desired to see there, and, sometimes may be, it took all the grace they had to ask God's blessing upon the paper and its editor, and, possibly in some cases; the grace was not sufficient and the editor was made aware of the fact in words that were not sweeter than honey. But with all its defects and shortcomings, it will, doubtless, generally be conceded that during these nineteen years the CONSERVATOR has been a great blessing to the church, and we much desire the prayers and the cooperation of all our readers in our attempt to make its twentieth volume the best in its history.

These nineteen years have been years of conflict for the church in which she has been tried and tested as if by fire. For sixteen years she has stood a united host with love as her bond of union, and the CONSERVATOR was her great tower of strength, and her weapon of defense against the enemy that sought her over- throw and through it she made a noble defense of her long-cherished prin- ciples and showed herself worthy of her existence as a church; But in recent years the conflict has been in her own ranks and it still rages with apparently ruinous effects; and the CONSERVATOR has had the very difficult and unpleasant task of deciding just how far it should allow itself to be used as a weapon of defense for and against the contending parties. It has sought to defend the church rather than either of the factions of the church, and to lend itself to those measures which looked to-ward peace and the cessation of strive, and it proposes to continue to do so.

During these nineteen; years three editors only have occupied the chair—Dr. Dillon for twelve years, Dr. Becker for nearly two years and the present in-cumbent the rest of the time, and the paper too has varied in its circulation from three to five thousand. We suggest that all our readers and agents renew their diligence, and seek to make the twentieth volume reach a cir-culation of at least five thousand before the convening of the next General Con-ference.

[written by the editor, C. H. Kiracofe]