Most new religious periodicals exist to defend a single argument, and The World's Crisis was no exception when a group of Adventists met at Lowell, Massachusetts in January 1854 and, in the words of the reference work that recorded it, "decided to establish a paper to give currency to their views." Their view was conditional immortality: that the soul does not survive death on its own, and that the wicked will ultimately be destroyed rather than tormented without end. It was a minority reading even among people who agreed Christ was coming soon, and they wanted a printing press to make the case for it.
The paper outlived the argument's novelty by decades. It moved from Lowell to Boston in February 1856, "where it has remained ever since," according to the same nineteenth century record, and stayed there through the rest of the century. Miles Grant, an Adventist preacher who had joined the conditional immortality camp two years earlier, took over as editor that same year and held the post for twenty years, 1856 to 1876.
What makes the paper worth recording here is timing more than content. It began publishing in 1854, six years before the readers it served organized themselves formally as the Advent Christian Association in 1860. The denomination did not create the paper. The paper's readers created the denomination. By the time the Advent Christian Church existed as an organized body, it inherited an outlet that had already been arguing its case in print for the better part of a decade, which is as direct a claim on a religious movement's own voice as a periodical can make.