Obituary! Died of consumption, Dorcas Z., wife of Alfred Hurlburt, aged 31 years. She leaves a husband and five small children to mourn her loss. ... [1]
Announcements of the deaths of infants, youth, and young parents courageously smile through their tears in almost every issue of the mid-nineteenth century Review. Often elaborated with details of disease, the dedication of the deceased, and the words, "asleep in Jesus," their frequency--by modern standards all out of proportion to the size of the Adventist movement--readily convinces us that something serious was wrong. Surely God would have preferred His trusting children to live, not sleep, in Jesus.
Light on Christ's work in the most holy place, standing by the Ten Commandments blotting out sin, quickly convinced Seventh-day Adventist pioneers that Jesus wanted His followers to be holy and that by His grace they could cooperate in sanctification through purposefully attending to His moral laws. Awareness that heaven was prepared also to help them be healthy through purposeful cooperation with physical laws took many years to come about.
We have already seen how sick John Andrews and James White were at times. They were not the only ones. It has been said that the only pioneer who kept really well was Joseph Bates. He was ill only a few days in his entire life, not counting his brief final illness. And he knew why he was well. He drank no tea or coffee, ate a sparse vegetarian diet, and spent much of his time in the out-of-doors traveling to convert sinners and establish saints.
But, you say, they must have known what the matter was with themselves, so why didn't they do something about it?
The answer is that they did not know what was wrong with themselves. [2] Even doctors in those days did not know what caused disease. An entry in Angeline Andrews's diary is enlightening:
"Carlos Beeman died this morning about 5. He had had a sore throat for some days. Yesterday he had it lanced and thought he was going to have a good night's rest. Ate quite a hearty supper. About 11 his wife gave him a dose of morphine which the doctor had ordered. He immediately went to sleep, from which he never awoke. Some attribute his sudden death to one thing, some to another. The doctor calls it the putrid sore throat." [3]
The germ theory was yet in the future. As late as the 1840s some physicians still bled their patients, believing that too much vitality caused disease. Opium, calomel, mercury, arsenic, and strychnine were commonly used to "break up disease" in the 1850s. By such means, doctors may have slain more sufferers than would have died if left alone.
Surgery was still in its infancy, with anesthetics only just coming into use. There were no X rays, antibiotics, or antihistamines. Practically nobody "went to the hospital," hospitals not being readily available. Even aspirin was as yet unknown.
Most people ate and drank whatever was available and appealed to them, often in large quantities heavily spiced at any hour of day or night. They saw no relation between their diet and their disease, between their aliment and their ailments. They kept their windows closed for fear of catching cold. They pulled their blinds to avoid fading the furniture. They rarely bathed. They overworked or underexercised as the mood or necessity struck them. Almost all failed to see that their way of life was a way of death.
As one of them acknowledged later: We had "little other idea of headache, dyspepsia [indigestion], nausea, fevers, etc., than that these were, for the most part, wholly beyond our control and ... ordered by God's hand ." [4]
Adventists never allowed liquor, of course, and in the 1850s they became quite conscious of the evils of tobacco. More than one believer cast his pipe into the stove or buried it in a furrow. But an attempt by a rather cantankerous couple in 1858 to compel the young church to give up pig meat brought a testimony from Sister White to the effect that angels were leading the church no faster than they knew was wise, and that individuals who run ahead of them have to retrace their steps.
"God is leading out a people, not a few separate individuals, here and there, one believing this thing, another that," she said. [5] The great issue confronting the movement in 1858 was organization. Apparently God wanted the brethren to link up as a team, trusting one another in leadership positions, unified as one in Christ, before He introduced this further light.
But once the organization of the General Conference was in the past, the angels evidently were instructed that it was time at last to talk about eating pig, and about many related matters as well.
Organization was achieved on Thursday, May 21, 1863. Light on the laws of health came in a vision fifteen days later, on Friday night, June 5, in Brother A. Hilliard's plain little farmhouse by the side of a road that still runs through green meadowland in the gently rolling country west of Otsego, Michigan, about thirty miles northwest of Battle Creek. Merritt Cornell and R. J. (not Horace) Lawrence were conducting tent meetings in the village of Otsego. Attendance was poor, perhaps because of a general anxiety over the Civil War, which would reach its climax at Gettysburg early in July. The Whites and a few others decided to drive over for the weekend to help with the preaching and cheer the brethren on. They held sundown worship at the Hilliard place. Near the end of their prayer season, Ellen placed her hands on James and pleaded for his health. All at once her thrilling exclamation, "Glory! Glory! Glory!" announced another vision. The group took their seats and awaited the outcome.
Forty-five minutes later, after the vision was over and she had taken her characteristic deep breaths, they asked her to tell what she had been shown but all she could say was that it was so strange they would not be able to understand it all at once.
The vision covered a comprehensive list of items. Ellen White's report written sometime later, [6] and likely augmented by the content of subsequent visions, began with a description of Adam and Eve in their Edenic beauty. It very solemnly indicted "animal food" (meat) as a chief cause of the decline of the human race. "Swine's flesh" was denounced in particular, but all other kinds of meat were also blamed.
The vision spoke against the use of alcoholic drinks, spices, and rich desserts. Tobacco was denounced as "a poison of the most deceitful and malignant kind," and tea and coffee, as having effects "similar to those of tobacco" but to a lesser degree. Eating too much even of good food, and snacking between meals or just before going to bed, were shown to be distinctly unhealthful. Overwork was presented as a great evil. And for the treatment of disease, Ellen White was instructed to sound an alarm against the use of "drugs"--arsenic, strychnine, calomel, etc.--as the word was used in those days.
The elimination of these unwise foods, practices, and prescriptions would surely have helped anyone to live better; but there was counsel on the positive side too: drink lots of water, exercise regularly out of doors, bring sunshine and fresh air indoors, and take a daily bath.
It was all so sensible! It is difficult today to understand why she didn't know how to explain it at first. But new and strange it most certainly appeared to be at the time.
Not that everything she saw in her visions on healthful living was first introduced to human knowledge through her revelations! Adventists make no such claim. Dr. Russell T. Trail's Water Cure Journal had been read by some of them for years, and at least John Loughborough, Annie Smith, the J. P. Kelloggs, and the J. N. Andrewses were acquainted to some extent with "rational methods" and hydrotherapy (or "hydropathy"). Even the Whites had tried a few water treatments and for some time had been keeping their windows open at night. James White had even begun a series of reprint articles on health in the Review.
The salubrious effects of hot and cold water were, after all, widely known and keenly appreciated in the Roman Empire! Arnold of Villanova, whom we met while discussing the 2300 days, taught water treatments and vegetarianism in the Avignon papal palace in the fifteenth century, and Luigi Cornaro taught similar ideas in Italy in the sixteenth. John Wesley's counsels on health were respected by his followers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even in the Millerite movement Dr. L. B. Coles articulated many ideas similar to those Ellen White expressed later; and we haven't even mentioned the famous vegetarian Sylvester Graham.
In short, through the influence of many previous and contemporary voices, water treatments, vegetarianism, the use of whole wheat bread, and a number of other health-directed reforms had all gained a following in America before 1863. As Ellen White began to read more widely on the subject after her 1863 vision, she was impressed by the parallels between what she was reading and what she had been shown, and in her book, How to Live, she published a number of articles by other reformers along with chapters of her own. She evidently expected that the similarities would act as a kind of endorsement in helping people accept her visions.
But without the visions the pattern wasn't clear. The knowledge that individual Adventists had picked up was fragmentary at best. And along with the many good ideas promoted by the professional reformers there were many notions, advocated with equal zeal and show of truth, that modern science has since proved to be utterly false. Even Dr. Trail, so often wise in the ways of water and good food, totally banned salt and sugar on the ground that the former was a "mineral poison" and the latter, "not a food at all." [7] Ellen White, relying on her revelations, avoided such pitfalls.
The claim that Seventh-day Adventists make for Ellen White's health visions is that they (a) recommended only good foods and procedures, ignoring or warning against the bad, and (b) provided intelligent religious motivation effective in directing millions to a balanced and useful life of health and, through better health, to greater spiritual victory.
Speaking for Seventh-day Adventists as one of their prominent evangelists and theologians, J. H. Waggoner as early as 1866 made the point that "we do not profess to be pioneers in the general principles of the health reform. ... But we do claim, "he went on, "that by the method of God's choice"--Ellen White's visions--"it has been more clearly and powerfully unfolded, and is thereby producing an effect"--the general adoption of the principles by Seventh-day Adventists--"which we could not have looked for from any other means." The visions, Waggoner went on, have placed healthful living lion a level with the great truths of the third angel's message" as "the means whereby a weak people may be made strong to overcome, and ... fitted for translation. [8]
In the terminology of the day, the new life-style was labeled "health reform." The word "reform" was popular. Many other reforms were being or had recently been advocated in America: prison reform, insane asylum reform, agricultural reform, educational reform, marriage reform, and others.
It was the "Era of Reform," a time when Horace Greeley could write, "Not to have been a reformer is not to have truly lived." Had health reform come to light a century later, in the 1960s, "reform" might have appeared as "revolution," and the whole concept as a "fitness revolution."
It was evidently designed of the Lord to revolutionize people's lives for the better, to help them be healthier and holier and, thereby, more happy too.
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