Could Expect Only Skeptical Hearing

There was an added factor that made still more difficult her work. While the Advent movement had existed as a well-defined group, the caution had been repeatedly sounded by the principal leaders that the believers should be on their guard against those who thought they had received dreams and visions from the Lord. All this was to the credit of the leaders, who, knowing something of church history, were aware that the movement would be troubled by deluded persons who hoped to find in such a spiritually awakened group an attentive audience for their hallucinations, false visions, and dreams. It has always been the tragedy of religion that the genuine graces and gifts of the Spirit have been so frequently imitated that prudent Christians, to say nothing of the skeptical world, have been slow to accept the genuine when it has appeared.EGWC 32.3

Thus Ellen Harmon could expect, not a receptive hearing, but rather a critical, skeptical one. The very fact that fanatics had imposed, at times, on different companies of Adventists, only made such companies doubly skeptical. ^{*There were, of course, exceptions. Of her first vision, or view, she says: “I told the view to our little band in Portland, who then fully believed it to be of God.”—A Sketch of the Christian Experience and Views of Ellen G. White (hereafter referred to by the short title Experience and Views), p. 5. For Joseph Bates’s own account of how he came to believe in the genuineness of her visions, see Appendix D, p. 581.}EGWC 33.1

Even if she had had a stout heart and a strong nervous constitution, she might have quailed at the thought of launching out on such a mission. That she did go forth in weakness and fear proves at least this much at the outset, she was no self-seeking person, in search of gain or fame.EGWC 33.2