Ellen White: Woman of Vision

Chapter 24—The Work In Australia Comes Of Age

Through the winter months of 1900—in the Southern Hemisphere that means May, June, and July—Ellen White was becoming more and more certain that she must soon go back to the United States. Conditions developing in connection with the work of the church in America, revealed to her in visions of the night, led to growing concern. The burden pressed heavily upon her heart. She could not forget that in January she had been shown a rather unusual outbreak of fanaticism at a camp meeting in America. She was deeply concerned over the increasing imbalance coming into the medical work, fostered by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in Chicago. Of her plans to leave Australia, she wrote: WV 361.1

Things have not been moving in right lines, and I must, in the fear of God, bear my testimony personally to those who are in danger of swaying the work disproportionately in the so-called medical missionary lines (Letter 123, 1900). WV 361.2

Critical situations had developed in Battle Creek, adding to her anxiety. At first she talked of leaving Australia in November. She did not see how she could close up her work before that. But by all means she felt she should attend the General Conference session scheduled for the coming February. WV 361.3

When she proposed to her son William that she must return to the United States, it was hard for him to grasp. How could it be? The Avondale school was just getting well under way. Construction on the Avondale Health Retreat at the front corner of the school land, across the road from the church, was just recently completed, and that enterprise was developing nicely. Land had been purchased for a sanitarium in Wahroonga, a suburb of Sydney, and building plans were under way. WV 361.4

And then there was her book on which they were pressing hard. Willie, at his request, had been relieved of administrative responsibilities in Australia and from his membership on the General Conference Committee. Both he and his mother felt that he should give unbroken attention to assisting her in publishing her books. How could they pull up stakes and leave all this and reestablish themselves in the United States? WV 361.5