Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Saved From One Problem

But what if the Lord had selected for the prophetic gift a person highly educated in English and possessed of obvious natural gifts in literary lines? Then someone would declare that there was nothing at all unusual about her good writing, her beautiful thoughts, her incisive expressions, because she had been well trained in literary lines, and gave natural evidence that she was thus well gifted. EGWC 471.2

Certainly God might have given to Mrs. White a miraculous gift of perfect grammar as she wrote out her visions. But her failure, sometimes, to employ correct grammar or flawless literary constructions does not thereby prove that God did not give her visions. Because of the fact that most readers of the Bible do not read the Greek, they do not know that the apostle John wrote many ungrammatical sentences in the book of the Revelation. Yet we have never heard any lover of the Bible offering derogatory remarks about John as a prophet of God, nor have we ever heard any of them criticizing the English translators of the book of Revelation as tamperers with the Word of God because they corrected John’s grammar. But the English translators did for John’s Revelation precisely what Mrs. White’s literary assistants did for some of her work. EGWC 471.3