Letters and Manuscripts — Volume 14 (1899)

Lt 235, 1899

Kellogg, J. H.

Strathfield, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

September 1899

Previously unpublished.

Dear Brother Kellogg:

I feel very much perplexed as to how to address you, after the words traced by your pen that some things I have written are not true. You relate that the influence of my writing on your mind was about as terrible as could be. I am sorry I was not able so to arrange my words that you could understand them. I have written letter after letter to you, all true, but with such feelings of reluctance and discouragement as are inexpressible. The impression made on my mind was no more favorable to the positions taken in the sanitarium than when the Lord said, Call upon the managers of the Sanitarium in Battle Creek to do a work they should have discerned needed to be done. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 1

The men sent to America from this country to learn all that they could about how to work were returned to this field with no special assistance in facilities. The very instruments to perform various operations that you had cast aside for better, we should have had to begin the work in this part of the Lord’s vineyard. But it was not the Lord who set you a work to do in so many lines that you could not see this. The means should not have come from your personal funds but by your personal influence from the institution under your direction to the sister institution just started in this very field. This would bear testimony before heaven that the abundant riches of the Sanitarium in Battle Creek brought into existence an humble institution that would give character to the work here where there was nothing of the kind in all this large portion of the Lord’s vineyard. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 2

It was the sister sanitarium that was called upon, not you, Dr. Kellogg, individually. But notwithstanding those appeals have been made in obedience to the instruction given me to give to the Sanitarium, the help has not yet come. Three thousand dollars were raised for this field by the General Conference, and Dr. Kellogg raised something short of a thousand dollars by soliciting donations for our hospital. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 3

You state you gave one thousand dollars out of your own funds and your brother made a donation likewise that he could ill afford to do. We were not instructed to call upon you to do this. I have invested in your institution quite a little sum—several hundreds of dollars—that could so easily have been transferred to the sanitarium we are as yet unable to commence to build. It was my right, given me of God, to solicit help to create and man our institution from the abundance that is being enjoyed in the largest sanitarium in the world. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 4

To whom were we supposed to look to establish a sanitarium here in this country where we were unknown and where the churches that were raised up were poor? I have done just the work I was authorized to do, and I want to see what shall be done. I have made my appeal. It has brought very little. Every dollar that has been received is on record. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 5

How many dollars in donations have you invested in objects creating considerable expense? When I was presented with the plan to raise funds from the conference to establish a consumptives’ home in Boulder, there was not one-twentieth part of the reason for that institution to be established that there was for the one such institution to be established in this country, [and] manned and provided with facilities. There is not one such institution in existence in all this new missionary field. The Lord in His providence permitted us to have a part in the work here, in the building of a sanitarium which would be a link in the chain that God would have forged to draw the attention [of the world]. 14LtMs, Lt 235, 1899, par. 6