Messenger of the Lord

The Witness of Uriah Smith

This kind of response happened from the earliest days of her ministry. Undaunted men like Joseph Bates became convinced through personal experience. ²⁰ Strong-willed men who had their own Biblical viewpoints could have divided the early group of Sabbatarian Adventists before they even organized as a church. Uriah Smith, in a sermon delivered at the 1891 General Conference, recalled his own personal experience of forty years: “Our relation to it [ministry of Ellen White] is our relation to something which arose with this work, which has gone right forward with it, side by side, which has interwoven itself into and through it, and all about it, from the day this message began until this present hour.” MOL 516.6

Smith described the potential chaos of those early days when men and women “came with almost as many different views on some points as there were individuals ... each one pressing his own individual ideas. Then the value of the Spirit of prophecy in connection with this work, again appeared. It pointed out the right course to pursue. And what was it? It was that the brethren should sink all their minor differences and their peculiarities of lesser importance, and unite in the one great movement of the third angel’s message. These examples are merely an index of what it has done all the way along—guarding against giving up the truths of the past, and pointing the way to light and truth in the future.” ²¹ MOL 516.7