How The Gift Of The Spirit Of Prophecy Came

In 1844, it is evident, God’s providence was preparing to call the agent through whom He should speak messages to the people of the rising movement. Our early pioneers often told us how the Lord appeared to a man, a believer in the second advent, giving him a vision of the journey of the advent people to the city of God. It was in this year 1844, in the State of Maine. In the experience, this man was told to tell the vision to others. He refused. He felt it impossible to tell a vision, a dream. He fairly demanded of the Lord that he should be excused. At last, as our early pioneers who knew the facts related it, the Lord indicated to the man in a later vision that he was excused. The angel told him that the burden had been laid on “one of the weakest of the weak.”SPIAM 26.3

Later, listening from outside a meeting hall where another was relating a vision to the believers, this man who had been excused said the vision he had heard related was the same that was given him, and that he had refused to tell. And he told of the word spoken to him, that one of the weakest would be chosen in his stead. (See “The Great Second Advent Movement,” by J. N. Loughborough, pp. 182, 183.)SPIAM 26.4

The agent next called to this service was surely one of the weakest, measured by human standards. Again, in calling a special agent, God had, as in New Testament days, “chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” 1 Corinthians 1:27. And in the history of this gift in the advent movement we have indeed seen how mightily God does work through human weakness.SPIAM 27.1