Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Charge Number 10

Mrs. White wrote: “I was shown the inhabitants of the earth in the utmost confusion. War, bloodshed, privation, want, famine, and pestilence were abroad in the land.”—Testimonies for the Church 1:268. EGWC 126.2

“This was exactly what all faultfinders of that date predicted—famine and pestilence. But nothing of the kind happened. There was no famine, no pestilence. Her predictions utterly failed. Where, then, did she get that ‘vision’? Not from God, surely, but from the ideas of those around her, the same as she got all her ‘visions.’ The event proved this.” EGWC 126.3

Mrs. White’s statement is from a vision dated August 3, 1861, less than four months after the war began. If we are to understand her words as applying simply to the Civil War, then we have a rather remarkable prediction. Certainly the North did not think, in so short a time as four months after the war began, that it would become the long-drawn-out, harrowing ordeal that it finally proved to be. Mrs. White was not expressing a generally held Northern view on August 3, 1861, when she wrote of “war, bloodshed, privation, want, famine, and pestilence.” Let that point be clearly understood. We repeat, it took more than four months for any general impression to take hold upon the North that an extended, sanguinary conflict lay ahead, with all the privations and dangers that such conflicts inevitably bring. Was there famine before the war ended? One of the main factors in defeating the South was reduced food supplies. The historical sketch on the “American Civil War” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica declares that certain Southern armies “were reduced to starvation.”—Volume 1, p. 767. (14th ed.) Was there pestilence? The facts are that more men died of disease than of bullets in the Civil War. ^* EGWC 126.4

Now, we are not here contending that Mrs. White was picturing the Civil War in the sentence under discussion. We simply say that if she was, she pictured it with a prophetic eye, and with knowledge beyond that possessed by others on August 3, 1861. EGWC 127.1