Owen Russell Loomis Crosier (1820-1913)

Millerite preacher and editor, of Canandaigua, New York, first writer on what was to become the Seventh-day Adventist sanctuary doctrine. He was baptized in autumn 1843 by E. R. Pinney. As a young itinerant preacher he was associated with Hiram Edson and F. B. Hahn, and in March 1845 collaborated with Hahn in publishing, at Canandaigua, the Day-Dawn, a small Millerite paper. According to J. N. Loughborough, he was with Edson in the cornfield at Port Gibson on the morning after the sad vigil of Oct. 22, 1844. In any case, he accepted Edson’s explanation of the Millerite disappointment, joined with Edson and Hahn in intensive Bible study in the winter of 1844–1845, and wrote out their joint findings on the subject of the sanctuary and its cleansing.

As the concept of the sanctuary ministry of Jesus developed, a progression of increasingly clear articles came from the pen of Crosier during 1845 and 1846. The first was in the Day-Dawn, first published in March 1845 (it appears as a part of a Canandaigua newspaper, Ontario Messenger, Mar. 26, 1845). Articles on the sanctuary types by Crosier appeared in the Day-Star during the latter part of 1845; these culminated with a lengthy essay in the Feb. 7, 1846, Day-Star Extra, published in Cincinnati, Ohio. Crosier’s exposition was endorsed by Edson and Hahn, who also provided funding for the special issue. Crosier’s presentation convinced Joseph Bates, James White, and other New England Adventists. Bates, in turn, presented the Sabbath doctrine to the Port Gibson group in a conference at Edson’s home. Crosier kept the Sabbath for a time and advocated it in the Day-Dawn in December 1846 (see Review and Herald 3:8, May 6, 1852), but soon repudiated it and his early sanctuary view.

In 1847 he anticipated the “new view” of the daily. Crozier (as he spelled it after about 1850) served on the staff of Joseph Marsh’s Advent Harbinger, 1847–1853. He placed the three angels’ messages (and the Sabbath) after the Advent. In 1850 he, Marsh, and others taught a doctrine of the millennium (“the age to come”) opposed by Adventists in general, a view foreshadowed only partly in one section of his sanctuary article of 1846. In 1858 he was an evangelist for the Michigan Conference of the Advent Christian Church.