The Scroll

Below is a brief bio on Charles Fitch a mighty man of God. His faithfulness to his Savior to the point of death is to be greatly admired and emulated. I pray that we like those who have gone before will pick up our cross and follow Christ. The following was taken from The Faithful Witness

In 1842, feel­ing the need of an accu­rate chart, Fitch and Apol­los Hale pre­pared the famous chart illus­trat­ing the ful­fill­ment of the last-​​time prophe­cies of Daniel. This was used exten­sively by the Mil­lerites. Fitch him­self used this chart and also other visual aids includ­ing a replica of the Daniel 2 statue that could be sep­a­rated into its var­i­ous parts. Charles Fitch became seri­ously ill, prob­a­bly with pneu­mo­nia, in the month of Octo­ber, 1844. He had chilled while bap­tiz­ing con­verts. He died on Mon­day, Octo­ber 14th, in full faith that he should awake in a few days in the like­ness of his Redeemer.

Another notable con­tri­bu­tion to Mil­lerism came in the sum­mer of 1843. At the time the pub­lic sen­ti­ment had begun to turn against the Mil­lerites, and many preach­ers and believ­ers were faced with expul­sion from their churches. But up to this point, William Miller had advised his fol­low­ers not to sep­a­rate from their churches.

Charles Fitch then preached a pow­er­ful ser­mon based on Rev­e­la­tion 18: “Baby­lon the great has fallen… Come out of her, my peo­ple!” Up to this point, most Protes­tants had iden­ti­fied Baby­lon in the text as the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church. In this ser­mon, Fitch labeled all the Protes­tant churches that had not accepted the mes­sage of Jesus’ Sec­ond Com­ing as Baby­lon. He then invited the Mil­lerites to sep­a­rate from their churches.

This cry was taken up by George Storrs, who cau­tioned the Mil­lerites not to orga­nize a new church, for “no church can be orga­nized by man’s inven­tion but what it becomes Baby­lon the moment it is orga­nized.” Joseph Marsh, edi­tor of the Voice of Truth, also sup­ported this call to sep­a­rate. The Mil­lerite lead­ers them­selves with­held from sup­port­ing this call, but nei­ther did they do any­thing to pre­vent it.