James White began publishing a little eight-page paper, The Present Truth, July, 1849. Additional issues came out more or less regularly for a year, after which the paper was transformed into the Review and Herald, which became the official organ of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The first issue of Present Truth was only 1,000 copies, an unimpressive printing compared with the mighty river of literature coming out from Seventh-day Adventist presses over the world today! The significant fact about this 1849 printing was not the size of it, but that it was the beginning of a great publishing work.WBEGW 32.3

There is a second impressive fact. This publishing work, which was to grow so steadily and impressively, was launched before the Sabbathkeeping company of Adventists had even taken definite form. But the third and most significant fact of all is this: The appeal to James White to publish at so early and unpropitious an hour in Adventist history did not come from some far-visioned man in the movement. It came from a young woman, not quite twenty-one years of age, who declared that God told her in vision that the Advent people must begin to publish, that if by faith they would go forward, ultimately the endeavor would “be like streams of light that went clear round the world.”WBEGW 32.4

It would be difficult to imagine the Seventh-day Adventist Church today without a far-flung publishing work. Those who look in on us always comment on this phase of our work and readily grant that it is one of the prime secrets of our evangelizing strength. But what most of them do not know—at least they routinely fail to mention it—is that our publishing work finds its origin in a vision given to Mrs. White.WBEGW 32.5

Yet Mrs. White had had only a few grades of formal education—a nearly mortal injury received when she was nine had virtually ended her school days. Why would a young woman with so little education be so insistent on the importance of beginning a publishing work?WBEGW 32.6

Why should she feel dogmatically certain that such a work, though beginning small, would someday become world-encircling? Did she not know that endless papers had been started through the years by numerous organizations, only to languish and die a few years later, without having created any stir in America, much less the world? One needs only to examine the records in historical society offices to find eloquent and doleful proof of this. Why should she so soon—this vision was in 1848—risk exposing to ridicule her claim to having received visions from God, by making this most improbable prediction about the potential growth of the Adventist publishing work? Again, why did she call upon her own husband to subject himself to the rigors of the forlorn-looking publishing project? Why not single out someone else to take the embarrassing risk of failure and then be able to blame him rather than her husband for that failure? She risked sinking both her own and her husband’s good name ere the budding movement had really gotten under way.WBEGW 33.1

A Hard Question

Only One Answer