A Pertinent Question

Strange, indeed, we repeat, that Ellen Harmon was not among the company who set their eyes on October, 1845. Why was she not carried away with the intriguing teaching, the dazzling feeling, that had taken hold of others round about her, if indeed she was an excitable person, easily influenced by current thinking, as some critics seek to explain her away? We leave them to answer this question. But that is not all. We have a related question for them. Why did she tell those who were awaiting the Advent that they would “be disappointed”? How did she know this? Those around her did not. The answer is plain—she had a vision. And the vision proved true! It was one of the first of a long series of visions that were to guide the Seventh-day Adventist Church and protect it from deception, fanaticism, and failure in the years ahead.WBEGW 24.3

A few years after her 1845 declaration, she again faced the question of time setting. And she faced it in the person of Joseph Bates, who evidently was not yet purged of the passion to set a date for the Advent. In 1850 he privately published a pamphlet in which he reckoned that Christ would come in October, 1851, just seven years after October 22, 1844, when He had entered the Most Holy Place of the sanctuary in heaven. He apparently presented this time-setting theory only in the one pamphlet, and largely confined his promotion of it to certain of the Sabbathkeeping Adventists in the State of Vermont. By the summer of 1851 the idea undoubtedly had begun to stimulate greatly the minds of those who believed it and to produce fervent preparation for the anticipated Advent. Remember, it was a staunch Advent pioneer who sponsored this idea.WBEGW 25.1

Did Ellen White join with those making such preparation? Do we find in her writings anything to endorse the views set forth by Joseph Bates? Now Bates, the only Millerite leader who belonged to the Sabbathkeeping group, might easily be expected to have had a strong influence on a frail young woman, if indeed her mind and spirit were as frail as her body. Let us look at the record. It reveals that she wrote no word in support of his theory. On the contrary, on June 21, 1851, Mrs. White had a vision on this matter of time setting, which led her to write:WBEGW 25.2

“Dear Brethren: The Lord has shown me that the message of the third angel must go, and be proclaimed to the scattered children of the Lord, and that it should not be hung on time; for time never will be a test again. I saw that some were getting a false excitement arising from preaching time; that the third angel’s message was stronger than time can be. I saw that this message can stand on its own foundation, and that it needs not time to strengthen it, and that it will go in mighty power, and do its work, and will be cut short in righteousness.WBEGW 25.3

“I saw that some were making every thing bend to the time of this next fall—that is, making their calculations in reference to that time. I saw that this was wrong, for this reason: Instead of going to God daily to know their present duty, they look ahead, and make their calculations as though they knew the work would end this fall, without inquiring their duty of God daily.”—The Review and Herald Extra, July 21, 1851.WBEGW 26.1

Thus by the time the falsely set date for Christ’s return might be expected to be gaining serious consideration on the part of those who accepted it, Mrs. White spoke out clearly, emphatically, against this and all other attempts at date setting. Note her words: “Time never will be a test again.” With disapproval she added: “I saw that some were getting a false excitement arising from preaching time.” We can happily add that Bates, and apparently most of those who had accepted his time-setting views, dropped them quietly, quickly, and forever. Never again did time setting take possession of any segment of that company of Christians soon to be known as Seventh-day Adventists. In other words, no message from Mrs. White ever did more to protect us from the folly of time setting—a danger that ever lurks to entrap a certain type of prophetic student—than these unqualified words: “Time never will be a test again.”WBEGW 26.2

We know not what Mrs. White may have said to her husband, James White, editor of the only paper we then had, the Review and Herald. But this we do know, nothing appeared in the Review in support of the idea that Christ would come in October, 1851. In fact, James White wrote in the Review on August 19 a series of reasons why he had never accepted this time-setting view.WBEGW 26.3

It is a part of the sad record of the first-day Adventist groups, following the breakup of the Millerite movement after the 1844 disappointment, that various of them kept setting dates for the Advent, with the recurring disappointment and disillusionment that inevitably followed. This probably best explains the depressing fact that most of these groups ultimately disintegrated and disappeared.WBEGW 27.1

Now comes the question: Why did Mrs. White say so dogmatically that “time never will be a test again”? How did she in June, 1851, know that Christ would not come in October of that year? The Millerite movement, of which she had been a member, had set time—October 22, 1844. And this was followed by the time-setting hope of 1845, mentioned by James White, to say nothing of time setting by other remnants of Millerism. It bears repeating that by any human law of probability, we would expect her to have concurred with the general idea of time setting—yes, if she was having hallucinations, as some have charged, and not true visions, or if she was influenced by current thinking, as others have declared. But the record shows that the reverse was true. And it is this very record that provides us one of the initial reasons for believing her claim that her visions were from God. These reasons were to increase steadily with the years.WBEGW 27.2

It is proper to add right here that God has not followed the plan of validating a prophet’s claims by speaking out from heaven in support of him, and thus suddenly and for all time settling the matter. God did that in behalf of only one, His own Son. The validation of the prophets has generally been slowly provided by their lives, their acts, and the nature of their messages. True, when God first sent Moses with a message to Israel in bondage, and Moses feared that the people would only ridicule his prophetic claim, the Lord did something special to aid him. God told him to take the staff in his hand and throw it down before the children of Israel and it would become a serpent, and then to lift it up again and it would become a staff. He assured Moses that this would cause the people to believe him. Here was something that men’s eyes could see, and thus it served a purpose initially.WBEGW 27.3

But as we look at Moses in the long perspective of the centuries, it never occurs to us to measure his prophetic claim by this experience of turning the staff into a serpent. We see him and his impressive deeds and messages in the context of the long years of his life and decide that the cumulative records warrants our believing that he spoke for God. In this we do right. We do not repudiate the incident of the staff made into a serpent; we simply consider it inconsequential by comparison with the other more weighty evidence. Indeed, if no other proof for his claim had developed in his long years of service and preaching, we might well be tempted to doubt that the incident of the serpent gave valid proof of his prophetic status.WBEGW 28.1

Now, when Mrs. White first began to have visions, which often were given to her in public, sometimes singular events occurred in relation to them that greatly impressed those who looked on. For example, there was the incident when she held at arm’s length, for approximately half an hour, a Bible weighing eighteen and a half pounds, a feat quite impossible of explanation by any ordinary laws of physical strength. Even a strong man could not begin to match this. And Mrs. White was frail. This incident, along with others, undoubtedly played a part at the outset, and rightly so, in the plans of God. Men need some aids to their faith at the beginning of the way—at least the great majority do—in order to believe someone’s breathtaking claim that he has received visions from God. Joseph Bates, and a few like him, came to their conclusions a little differently, as we have already noted in his testimony.WBEGW 28.2

We have the advantage today of being able to look back over a century of time—a great advantage indeed—as we seek to evaluate her claims. We have already noted a few important incidents and attitudes on fanaticism and time setting. But much more remains to be presented.WBEGW 29.1