Manuscript Releases, vol. 16 [Nos. 1186-1235]

MR No. 1227—The Use of Natural Remedies in the Treatment of Illnesses; Challenging the Church to Reach the Entire World with the Gospel

(Written April 6, 1899, from “Sunnyside,” Cooranbong, NSW, to Dr. J. H. Kellogg.)

I have just read your letter. This, with the enclosures, was the only mail I received this month. I am very much better in health. I can accomplish a large amount of writing, and I find there are many things to engage my mind. 16MR 287.1

I wish I could see you face to face, but as I cannot I will write. Thank you for your prescription. I will be careful. The Lord help me, is my prayer, and I pray that the Lord may help you, my brother, that you may not take on too many burdens, and by so doing disqualify yourself for the management of them. 16MR 287.2

Should you be removed by sickness or death, who is there prepared to carry these responsibilities? The physicians under you may have an interest in this large and broad work, but they have not the long experience you have had. While you are in a position to educate, you should select a number of men, and train them to carry the responsibilities. Under your education, united with you, they may learn to do the work you have been doing by the help God has given you. 16MR 287.3

The influence you have gained in the medical profession is large and broad, and in some respects it has been as God would have it. You have caused the light God has given you to shine forth to others, and this light has influenced others to labor in the different lines of the medical work. But according to the light the Lord has given me, something of the spirit of Freemasonry [The Freemasons are a secret society based on the principles of brotherliness, charity and mutual aid. Apparently Ellen White saw a parallel between the spirit of the close-knit medical fraternity and that of the Freemasons.] exists, and has built a wall about the work. The old, regular practice has been exalted as the only true method for the treatment of disease. And to a large degree this feeling has leavened the physicians connected with you. They have resorted to drugs in cases of fever—to break it up, as they have thought. This method has broken up fevers and other diseases, but in some cases it has broken up the whole man with it. 16MR 287.4

The Lord has been pleased to present this matter before me in clear lines. Fever cases need not be treated with drugs. The most difficult cases are best and most successfully managed by nature's own resources. This science, fully adopted, will bring the best results, if the practitioner will be thorough. The Lord will bless the physician who depends on natural methods, helping every function of the human machinery to act in its own strength the part the Lord designed it to act in restoring itself to proper action. 16MR 288.1

Dr. Kellogg, God has given you favor with the medical fraternity, and he would have you hold that favor. But in no case are you to stand as do the physicians of the world to exalt allopathy above every other practice, and call all other methods quackery and error; for from the beginning to the present time the results of allopathy have made a most objectionable showing. There has been loss of life in your sanitarium because drugs have been administered, and these give no chance for nature to do her work of restoration. Drug medication has broken up the power of the human machinery, and the patients have died. Others have carried the drugs away with them, making less effective the simple remedies nature uses to restore the system. The students in your institution [Battle Creek Sanitarium] are not to be educated to regard drugs as a necessity. They are to be educated to leave drugs alone. 16MR 288.2

The medical fraternity, represented to me as Freemasonry, [See footnote on page 288.] with their long, unintelligible names which common people cannot understand, would call the Lord's prescription for Hezekiah quackery. Death was pronounced upon the king, but he prayed for life, and his prayer was heard. Those who had the care of him were told to get a bunch of figs and put them on the sore, and the king was restored. This means was taken by God to teach them that all their preparations were only depriving the king of the power to rally and overcome disease. While they pursued their course of treatment, his life could not be saved. The Lord diverted their minds from their wonderful mysteries to a simple remedy of nature. 16MR 289.1

There are lessons for us all in these directions. Young men who are sent to Ann Arbor to obtain an education which they think will exalt them as supreme in their treatment of disease by drugs, will find that it will result in the loss of life rather than restoration to health and strength. These mixtures place a double taxation upon nature, and in the effort to throw off the poisons they contain, thousands of persons lose their lives. We must leave drugs entirely alone, for in using them we introduce an enemy into the system. I write this because we have to meet this drug medication in the physicians in this country, and we do not want this practice, as in Battle Creek, to steal into our midst as a thief. We want the door closed against the enemy before the lives of human beings are imperiled. 16MR 289.2

Dr. Kellogg, I am perplexed to know what to do for means, but I do not ask you to take this burden upon you. God forbid that you should have any unnecessary burdens to bear. One thing I shall do: I shall make appeals to every church, irrespective of any persons in responsible positions. There is a work to be done in this country, and the people who have had the benefit of my husband's labor and my own in building up the work on the Pacific Coast and in Battle Creek must understand how hard we have labored, and help us. I do not call on the conference. I come to the people and appeal to them for help. If we can once get established, we shall work without assistance, but we must have help now. We cannot do without it. 16MR 290.1

You write that the conference [brethren] say that Australians had more means than any other place. That may be, but as long as the providence of God opens new fields for us, shall we refuse to enter them and refuse to establish in this new world a working force that will send laborers into other fields? How can the people hear without a preacher, and how can he preach except he be sent? We mean, by the help of God, to warn the world, to carry our testimony to regions beyond. 16MR 290.2

We are called upon by the Lord to preach the truth without delay. All the country between the places where interests are already established, is calling for the truth. We have the third angel's message, the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, and this truth is to encircle cities and towns. We are to carry the message from point to point, establishing in each a little community of missionaries. The workers in Australia are directed to enlarge the sphere of their labors by sending help to the unpromising fields in regions beyond, where the standard of truth has never yet been lifted. 16MR 290.3

We do not propose to colonize, to build up strong centers to the neglect of other fields. But we are to enlarge the circle of our operations, as those who believe they are giving the last message of warning to the world, as Christ gave to His disciples just before His ascension (Matthew 28:19, 20; Mark 16:19, 20). God's professed people in America should have been awake to do this work. In the place of centering so many interests in Battle Creek, plants should have been made in city after city. If they had been filled with zeal for the truth, they would have let their light shine to others, and would have labored to prepare a people to stand in the day of the Lord. 16MR 291.1

We may have had more means than some other places, but we have a showing for all this. Progressive work has been done. New fields have been entered, and still there are more opening around us. The word comes, Add new territory. We are to traverse all parts of Australia. Missionaries are needed who will come to this country to do earnest work for the Master. May the Lord arouse His people who know the truth to impart the knowledge they have. Let us pray each day the prayer, so full of meaning, that Christ gave His disciples: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” 16MR 291.2

Aggressive warfare is before all who believe the truth. We are to make unbounded progress and improvement in carrying forward the work that mortal man is privileged to do under the command of the great General of armies. God sends His angels as ministering spirits to go before the true worker, and unite with him. The truth is to work our hearts by the Holy Spirit's power. We are to call upon those who know the truth to enter into the work of cooperating with the angels of God. We are to be discouraged at nothing. We are to hope for everything in moral advancement, in spreading the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ our Lord. We are to call upon the Lord in every emergency, at every step. 16MR 292.1

Living principles are laid down in the Word of God. Why do not believers read to a purpose and obey? Why do they not appoint themselves missionaries? We need families in Australia, not men and women who wish to be carried, but workers, wise men who can manage. We want those who can lift with us. 16MR 292.2

Our duty to the world is broad and deep. We are to do unto others as we would they should do unto us. The truth must go everywhere, and we want those who can plead with the Lord in prayer, who will bend the knee before God, abolishing the fashion which has come in among our people and has been transported by our workers to other countries, of standing like the Pharisees and praying to be heard of men. We want all who know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, to bow low at His footstool, and pray that the world may hear the message of warning, that it may be caught up by those who hear it, and carried to those who know it not. 16MR 292.3

Let us kneel before God with humble hearts, and give expression to our reverence for Him. All pride, all pomposity, must be laid in the dust. Make known your desires to God. The sincere, truehearted worker will not fail nor be discouraged, for God from His high and holy place looks upon the contrite one, and He will empower him at every step. He will set in action almighty agencies to warn the world to prepare to meet its God. 16MR 292.4

The human instruments through whom God works are not to stand, as now, in discord and variance. Those who have faith in Christ as their all-sufficient Saviour will be in perfect unison with Him. When self is hid with Christ in God, there will be no disunion, no variance, no strife. All will be in perfect sympathy with Christ to save the world in God's appointed way. God calls upon His church to minister for Him and with Him in the saving of perishing souls. Then in the place of drawing away from Christ and from one another, the workers will seek to keep the breath of life in the church. They will trim their lamps with the holy oil which the two olive branches will, through the two golden pipes, communicate to them. Light will be imparted by the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth. 16MR 293.1

God will test every church in our world. Those who know the truth but are not doers of the word are the worst stumbling blocks we could have in our work of advance. God calls upon His people to arouse and trim their lamps. Never till Zion travails for perishing souls can she see the working of the Holy Spirit in sinners born again. Christ is waiting to be gracious to those who will labor with one spirit and one mind to minister the truth for this time. Christ has appointed the Christian ministry and the various means of grace comprehended in the ministry. When unity in Christ is revealed, when Jesus is acknowledged by precept and practice, the Holy Spirit will reveal the willingness of the two anointed ones to empty the golden oil out of themselves into the vessels prepared to receive it.—Letter 67, 1899. 16MR 293.2

Ellen G. White Estate

Washington, D. C.,

December 4, 1986.

Entire Letter.