A Great Literary Output

Considering the fact that, as a girl, Mrs. White had been prevented from getting more than a common-school education, it is all the more unexplainable, from the natural standpoint, that she should have written what she did. With no preparation for literary work, she produced books that the best minds have admired, as we shall see.SPIAM 32.2

It was done in weakness. We are told in “Life Sketches of Mrs. E. G. White,” that for a considerable time after her call to service she was unable to write. Of a time well on in the year 1845, she says:SPIAM 32.3

“Up to this time I could not write; my trembling hand was unable to hold a pen steadily. While in vision, I was commanded by an angel to write the vision. I obeyed, and wrote rapidly. My nerves were strengthened, and from that day to this [written in 1880] my hand has been steady.”—Page 90.SPIAM 32.4

The writing was often done amid the rush of daily interviews and ministry, at home and abroad; and often through the years it was done amid physical weakness. In 1891 Mrs. White was asked by the General Conference Committee to visit Australia, where a vigorous work was growing up in a new field. A year and a half later she wrote to the headquarters office in America:SPIAM 32.5

“With the writings that shall go in this mail, I have since leaving America written twenty hundred pages of letter paper. I could not have done all this writing if the Lord had not strengthened and blessed me in large measure. Never once has that right hand failed me. My arm and shoulder have been full of suffering, hard to bear, but the hand has been able to hold the pen and trace words that have come to me from the Spirit of the Lord.”—Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 340.SPIAM 33.1

While these writings are not placed on the same level as Holy Scripture, as we have shown, one who reads the volumes of the Spirit of prophecy will find that they bear the impress of the same Spirit that spoke in the ancient prophets. There is something unmistakably characteristic of these writings that is not found in other works that we publish. The divine credentials of these writings are discovered in the reading of them.SPIAM 33.2