Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Nothing Concealed, Nothing Inconsistent

These two quotations, and the one already given from Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, 118, reveal no inconsistency in Mrs. White’s personal life. The reader will note that it is Mrs. White herself who provides the critic with the information he has concerning her life. He did not have to secure this by some private detective method. Mrs. White saw no reason to conceal her course of life. ^* From the outset she sought to follow a course in harmony with her teachings. She declared that there had been times when she felt it necessary to eat a little meat. This was strictly in keeping with her counsel that healthful living calls for eating the best food that is available. Now writing from Australia, she provides a further commentary on this point. In still another statement, written about this time, she describes her family’s fare and her home in Australia, and again enunciates the principle that should govern in the matter of meat eating: EGWC 389.3

“We have plenty of good milk, fruit, and bread. I have already consecrated my table. I have freed it from all flesh meats. It is better for physical and mental soundness to refrain from living upon the flesh of animals. As far as possible we are to come back to God’s original plan.”—MS. 25, 1894, in Counsels on Diet and Foods, 488. EGWC 389.4

Who will say, from all the evidence before us, that Mrs. White did not follow out the basic principles she set down; namely, “as far as possible we are to come back to God’s Original plan.” Her 1896 letter simply indicates that she had been loath arbitrarily to set diet limits for some who sat at her table. EGWC 390.1

But does this 1896 statement by Mrs. White prove that she got her “light” on abstaining from meat eating from “a Catholic woman” rather than in visions of the night as she had claimed through the years? Look once more at the whole paragraph. What was it that Mrs. White saw “in a new light”? Was it the basic view that meat was not best for food, or that it might carry germs? No. These and other reasons Mrs. White had stated repeatedly for about thirty years! What was the trouble at her table in Australia? She states that some who worked for her thought that they must have meat to eat, in order to do their heavy work. So, she adds, “I was enticed to place it on my table.” Then follows her statement about “taking the lives of animals to gratify a perverted taste,” and the appeal of the “Catholic woman.” What she saw, therefore, in a new light, was the taking of the “lives of animals to gratify a perverted taste,” and the relation of this to the plea of her workmen for meat. Her conviction that a flesh diet is not the best, she had set forth long before. EGWC 390.2