WHITE, ELLEN GOULD

WHITE, ELLEN GOULD (1826–1915), prophetess and cofounder of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Ellen Gould Harmon was born November 26, 1827, on a farm near Gorham, Maine. As a child she moved with her family to Portland. When she was nine or ten, an angry schoolmate hit her in the face with a rock, knocking her unconscious for several weeks. The accident left her a semi-invalid, unable to continue her schooling (except for a brief period at the Westbrook Seminary and Female College) and unlikely to fulfill her ambition of becoming a scholar.

Raised a Methodist, Ellen in 1840 joined the Millerites, who believed that Christ would return to earth in 1843 or 1844. When he failed to appear on October 22, 1844, the date finally agreed upon, disappointment and confusion swept through the Millerite camp. In December, while praying with friends for guidance, seventeen-year-old Ellen went into a trance, the first of many visions during which she claimed to receive divine illumination. In this state God assured her that the Millerites' only mistake lay in confusing the second coming of Christ with the beginning of the heavenly judgment, which had indeed begun on October 22. In 1846 Ellen was shown the importance of observing the seventh-day sabbath. In both instances her visions supported doctrines that others were already teaching, a pattern that came to characterize her role as a religious leader.

In 1846 Ellen married James White, who became her editor, publisher, and manager. For several years they traveled throughout the Northeast preaching their sabbatarian message. When children began arriving, Ellen reluctantly left them with friends. In 1852 the weary, impoverished couple settled in Rochester, New York, where they collected their children about them and James acquired a printing press. After three discouraging years, the Whites moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, where in the early 1860s they formally created the Seventh-day Adventist church, then numbering about 3,500 members.

Health concerns dominated Ellen White's life during the 1860s. Since her childhood accident she had suffered almost constantly from an array of illnesses: heart, lung, and stomach ailments, frequent "fainting fits" (sometimes once or twice a day), paralytic attacks, pressure on the brain, breathing difficulties, and bouts of anxiety and depression. At times she feared that Satan and his evil angels were trying to kill her. In 1863, only months after using water treatments to nurse her children through a diphtheria epidemic, she received a special vision on health. Adventists, she learned, were to give up eating meat and other stimulating foods, shun alcohol and tobacco, and avoid drug-dispensing doctors. When sick, they were to rely solely on nature's remedies: fresh air, sunshine, rest, exercise, proper diet, and, above all, water. A second vision on health led her in 1866 to establish the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, the first of a worldwide chain of Adventist sanitariums.

During the 1870s the Whites spent considerable time proselytizing on the West Coast. In 1881, James died. Following a yearlong depression, Ellen White resumed her ministry through missions to Europe (1885–1887) and to Australia and New Zealand (1891–1900). Upon returning to the United States in 1900, she purchased a farmhouse near Saint Helena, California, from whence she continued to guide her growing church. Although she never assumed formal leadership of the Adventist organization, White wielded enormous influence, especially late in her career, in matters relating to both doctrine and policy. While in semiretirement, she directed a major campaign to build an Adventist sanitarium "near every large city" and to open a medical school, the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University), in southern California. She died on July 16, 1915, at age eighty-seven; over 136,000 Seventh-day Adventists mourned her passing.

Although better at speaking than writing—her modest reputation among non-Adventists derived largely from her lectures on temperance—Ellen White enjoyed her greatest success as an author. Between the late 1840s, when her first broadsides appeared, and 1915, she published over a hundred books and pamphlets and contributed thousands of articles to church periodicals. Since her death the Ellen G. White Estate has brought out dozens of additional books, compiled from her letters, sermons, and articles. Few subjects escaped her attention. Among her most notable works were three sets of books on biblical history and eschatology: Spiritual Gifts (1858–1864), Spirit of Prophecy (1870–1884), and the "Conflict of the Ages Series" (1888–1917), which included The Great Controversy between Christ and Satan, her major eschatological work. Her health writings began with a tract on the perils of masturbation, An Appeal to Mothers (1864), and culminated with the widely circulated Ministry of Healing (1905). In Education (1903), she emphasizes "the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers." Between 1855 and 1909 she published thirty-seven volumes of Testimonies for the Church, in which she relayed counsel that she had received in visions. The most popular of her books was Steps to Christ (1892), a brief devotional work that sold in the millions.

Since early in Ellen White's career critics have alleged that she sometimes contradicted herself, failed to acknowledge—and on occasion denied—her indebtedness to other authors, and allowed her testimonies to be manipulated by interested parties close to her. In response, she insisted on the consistency, originality, and independence of her inspired writings. "I do not write one article in the paper expressing merely my own ideas. They are what God has opened before me in vision—the precious rays of light shining from the throne" (Testimonies for the Church, vol. 5, p. 67). In recent years scholars have uncovered evidence that she borrowed extensively from other authors and that her literary assistants provided more than routine editorial and secretarial services.

Although Ellen White preferred to style herself as "the Lord's messenger" rather than as a prophetess, she classed herself with the biblical writers. "In ancient times God spoke to men by the mouth of prophets and apostles," she wrote in 1876. "In these days he speaks to them by the Testimonies of his Spirit" an unambiguous reference to her own work (Testimonies, vol. 4, p. 148). Many early Adventists, including her own husband, resisted efforts to equate her writings with the Bible and to make acceptance of her inspiration a "test of fellowship." Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century Adventist churches were "disfellowshipping" members who questioned her gift, and were relying on her views to determine the correct reading of scripture. Among the faithful the very phrase "Spirit of Prophecy" became synonymous with Ellen White and her writings, which they regarded as authoritative not only in theology but in science, medicine, and history as well.

Bibliography

To date, no full-scale biography of Ellen White has appeared. Of the several autobiographical accounts, the most complete is Life Sketches of Ellen G. White (Mountain View, Calif., 1915), the last part of which was compiled by assistants. In 1981 Arthur L. White, a grandson of the prophetess, brought out the first installment (volume 5, covering the years 1900–1905) of a projected six-volume official biography, Ellen G. White (Washington, D. C., 1981–), which, though unabashedly apologetic, presents considerable new detail. My own work Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York, 1976) offers a nonapologetic interpretation of White's health-related activities. For guidance in using White's own writings, there is a splendid three-volume Comprehensive Index to the Writings of Ellen G. White (Mountain View, Calif., 1962–1963).

Ronald L. Numbers (1987)