Terry, I read those letters, replies, more letters, replies, and ultimately a lynching......very interesting
I wonder if the elder who wrote those original letters feels a bit vindicated by the elimination of the book study meeting every week....I know there were other factors, but this is a great example of someone losing priviledges for not agreeing with the GB only to have the GB make changes that agree with the thinking he originally got in trouble for.
Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's the availability of information was restricted to newspapers, telegraph, word of mouth and very little of any of that was informative.
An unsophisticated person being exposed for the first time to Bible Chronology and Pyramidology must have been blown away by the sophistication of it! The way the numbers seem to line up with the bible knocked their socks off!
Naive people with no way of satisfying skeptical curiousity fell prey to the rhetoric and urgency of the Adventist messages.
I don't so much blame people for their unsophisticated gullibility as I would today.
Remember, not until after 1995 was there any way to really investigate in detail what the Watchtower Society REALLY said in their publications from early times.
The contradictions began to emerge as something more than rumors and scuttlebutt from apostates.
That is pretty darned recent by any standard.