Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Call to Come Out Begins to Sound

The result was that by the end of 1843 Adventist ministers began to apply to the churches the prophetic words of John, “Babylon is fallen,” and to invoke the command that accompanies this declaration, “Come out of her, my people.” (See Revelation 14:8; 18:1-4.) They rightly reasoned that “Babylon” refers to religious bodies, and that the message of its “fall” is sounded by the angel that follows immediately the one who announces that the hour of God’s judgment is come. EGWC 299.1

And as they preached these prophetic words regarding Babylon’s fall, they focused, not so much on the failure of the churches to believe that Christ would come in 1844, as on their outright denial of the doctrine of the premillennial, personal, literal coming of Christ, and their ridicule of it. This too is clear from the record. EGWC 299.2

They noted also the cold formalism that passed for Christianity and the doctrinal heresies that were fast eating out the foundations of many New England churches. EGWC 299.3

Naturally, as the Adventist ministers explored more fully the words, “Babylon is fallen,” they began to see those words in relation to the fact that many thousands of church members, and not infrequently ministers, held slaves. ^* To the Adventist ministers, who were largely abolitionists, slavery was a heinous sin. They cogently argued that slaveholding and the personal coming of Christ were ideas that no one wished to entertain at the same time. This fact of slavery provided an additional text for their preaching: “Come out of her, my people.” Rightly could they call attention to the fact, for fact it was, that many who lived in Northern States were far from having any crusading conviction against slavery. About half of the chapter in Spiritual Gilts, from which the passage under fire is quoted, is an indictment of slaveholding church members. EGWC 299.4