To All Nations

At this time Seventh-day Adventists had attained a membership in the United States of about twenty thousand. They were conducting missions in central Europe, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Australia; but there were less than five hundred members in lands across the sea, and no missions had as yet been started among heathen peoples. In God’s providence they were soon to embark upon a missionary expansion that must culminate in their carrying to “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people” the message committed to them of heaven. They were to unite with and supplement the great worldwide mission movement which began with the opening of the nineteenth century. And steps were now being taken so that when the time was ripe and conditions made it possible for them to take their place in the foreign mission enterprise, they would be able to send out missionaries trained to relieve human suffering.SHM 259.5

We have portrayed in outline only certain reform movements in temperance, diet, rational therapy, and health education in the early part of the nineteenth century. And so also it will be of interest to note the preliminary medical missionary phase of the great evangelical movements, to which Seventh-day Adventists were now being called to give heed.SHM 260.1