Ellen G. White and Her Critics

A Controversy With Himes

In the Review and Herald in 1864, Uriah Smith, now the editor, examines the claim of Joshua V. Himes, who had been prominent in the 1844 movement, that the Roman Catholic “church alone constitutes Babylon.” The emphatic rejoinder is: “The papal church does not alone constitute Babylon.” In support of this the editor sets down a series of propositions: EGWC 330.4

“1. That the papal church is only that portion of Babylon represented by the mother. 2. That there are harlot daughters, which are all included under the term Babylon. 3. That these daughters are the various degenerate Protestant sects, which are bound by human creeds, and, cherishing many of the heresies of the papacy, are following in its footsteps. 4. That the Scriptures seem to speak of Babylon under the two divisions of mother and daughters, Rev xvii, dealing specially with the mother, or Papal Babylon, and chap. xviii, with the daughters, or Protestant Babylon. That this conclusion is necessary, from the fact that the testimony taken together, must embrace them both; and there are statements in chap. xvii, which cannot apply to Protestantism, and others in chap. xviii, which cannot apply to the Papacy. 5. That scattered through these various Protestant sects, the people of God were to be found almost exclusively, prior to the proclamation of the Advent doctrine, or first angel’s message from 1840 to 1844. 6. That in consequence of their rejecting the doctrine of the Advent, those churches met with a change, grieved God’s Spirit by shutting their eyes to the truth, and suffered a moral fall.”—November 29, p. 4. EGWC 330.5

Note that the editor, in refuting the claim that Babylon is Rome “alone,” first declares that “the papal church does not alone constitute Babylon.” Then he moves on until in point 5 he uses the term Babylon “almost exclusively” to describe the “various Protestant sects,” because in them, he says, “the people of God were to be found almost exclusively” in the early 1840’s, which is the time of the fall of Babylon to which Adventist ministers referred in their preaching. EGWC 331.1