The 1915 Mar 1 issue of the Watch Tower admitted to these changes in the following article.
It's interesting, if you read the rest of that article, the attitude with which these changes were made. Here's a quote from the same page, the last page of the March 1, 1915 Watchtower, the aforementioned changes are on.
"So far from the events of our time disproving the chronology, they seem to confirm it. [] The gathering of the nations to the Valley of Jehoshaphat ("valley of graves") is evidently in progress. They are gradually realizing it to be a life and death struggle that will be awfully costly. They do not see, as we do, that it means their destruction--'grinding to powder'. Nevertheless they are apprehensive of what we see coming; viz., the Earthquake of revolution, to be followed by the Fire of anarchy, which will utterly consume them and prepare the earth for Messiah's kingdom, and cause them to hear the 'still small voice'."
They say, if anything, rather than proving we were wrong, the fact that none of us went to heaven like I told you we would proves I'm right! It doesn't get any more disconnected from reality than that.
From this paragraph, it is clear that the Bible Students of that time still continued to believe, incorrectly, that the end was going to occur, apparently, from what they're saying, as the direct result of World War I, which would lead to anarchy and then the Kingdom. 98 years later, hey, it ain't peachy, but it ain't anarchy, either. But reading the source material really shows just how much revision to the Watchtower's history is going on.
Interesting, too, is that the same exact guilt trip is put on the believers as was later used 60 years later after 1975. Note the next paragraph:
"The present is a time of testing, we believe, to many of the Lord's people. Have we in the past been active merely because we hoped for our glorious change in A.D. 1914, or have we been active because of our love and loyalty to the Lord and his message and the brethren!"
So if you believed the nonsense the Watchtower writers taught you, it was your motives, your loyalty to God, that are to be called into question, not theirs for misleading you.
And if you were ever in doubt as to what this religion is all about, another paragraph tells it exactly like it is:
"If there are some parts where colporteurs find it difficult to make sales because of scarcity of money, there are other parts of the country where money is not so scarce and where high prices for food make the community prosperous."
Now maybe I'm not clear on what's being said here. Either way, they're selling this message, quite clearly, so either they're being advised to sell it in richer areas, or the reader is being told that the sales of literature from richer areas have resulted in more money coming to Watchtower that can then be...investing in making more literature? used to help Bible Students in need? Not sure. There's only so many ways to interpret that sentence, though, and I don't know if any of them sound particularly good, from a Christian perspective, though from a sales perspective, a business perspective, it sounds just fine. It does highlight that this so-called preaching work, for the majority of the time it has existed, was little more than the sale of books and magazines. Apparently Jesus was okay with turning the very ministry itself into a house of merchandise for Rutherford & gang...until 1990, that is, when 'he realized' we should just follow his words written nearly 2,000 years before to "give free" and not sell the good news of the kingdom to people.
Just had to throw that out there.
--sd-7
