Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Fictitious Date Needed to Support Charge

We are unable to discover what is the ground for the statement that Mrs. White wrote the foregoing in “September, 1850.” But this we do know, that these words of hers were printed not later than January 31, 1849! On that date there was published a broadside entitled To Those Who Are Receiving the Seal of the Living God. This contained, among other statements, the vision quoted above. At the close of the broadside is the name “E. G. White,” and the line “Topsham [Maine], Jan. 31, 1849.” Hence, whatever the reason that prompted Mrs. White to make her statement concerning the nearness of the end of time, that reason was not Bates’s theory. EGWC 256.4

In commenting further on Mrs. White’s statement, the critic declares: “In September, 1850, she limited the time to ‘a few months,’ ‘time almost finished,’ etc. Note how evidently she relied upon Bates’s seven years.” We ask the reader to look again at the quotation from Mrs. White that we have given—and we have quoted all that the critic quotes in his work, and more. Her statement does not contain the phrase, “a few months.” Just why the critic declares that she used this phrase in this particular passage will become evident when we examine, now, the second statement by her which is supposed to show that she accepted Bates’s seven-year theory. EGWC 257.1