Publishing

In November 1848, Ellen White had a vision in the home of Otis Nichol in Dorchester, Massachusetts. When she came out of the vision she said to her husband James, ” ‘I have a message for you. You must begin to print a little paper and send it out to the people. Let it be small at first; but as the people read, they will send you means with which to print, and it will be a success from the first. From this small beginning it was shown to me to be like streams of light that went clear round the world’ ” (LS 125).GP 111.1

“Streams of light . . . clear around the world”! How could that be? Jesus was coming soon. There were few Sabbath keeping Adventists, and none of them were great scholars or wealthy persons. Furthermore, the world was unbelieving. Yet this young woman predicted that a work of publishing to be started by her penniless husband would grow until it encompassed the globe.GP 111.2

More than half a year went by before James White could make even the smallest beginning. In the summer of 1849, he arranged for the printing, on credit, of a thousand copies of an eight-page paper called Present Truth . As Ellen White had been shown, enough funds did come in to defray the cost, and James White continued to publish the little paper, which in 1850 he renamed The Second Advent Review and Sabbath Herald . Today, Seventh- day Adventists publish literature in more than 270 languages in 57 publishing houses around the world.GP 111.3