Contrary to popular opinion, the passage of time did not change the attitude of leadership. They devised a plan to get Ellen White out of Battle Creek and away from headquarters, and thus keep her from constantly seeing what the brethren were doing. With the General Conference president in the chair, the Foreign Mission Board voted for her to go to Australia. This was announced to the church through the Review, June 2, 1891.
What the brethren voted and what the Lord had in mind for Ellen White, were two different things. She agonized over the plan:--
"I have not special light to leave America for this far-off country." "I cannot see my way clear to go." "I am considering, Can it be my duty to go to Australia?" [Uncertainty prevailed up to one month before she actually sailed November 12, 1891.][1]
The conviction remained with her. Five years later she wrote from Australia to the General Conference president:
"The Lord was not in our leaving America. He did not reveal that it was His will that I should leave Battle Creek. The Lord did not plan this, but He let you all move after your own imaginings. ... We were needed at the heart of the work, and had your spiritual perception discerned the true situation, you would never have consented to the movement made. ... It was not the Lord who devised this matter. I could not get one ray of light to leave America. ... O how terrible it is to treat the Lord with dissimulation and neglect, to scorn His counsel with pride because man's wisdom seems so much superior."[2]
The same committee that exiled Ellen White to Australia took a similar action a few months later in the spring of 1892, sending E. J. Waggoner to England. Thus the trio the Lord used at and following Minneapolis was broken up. History makes it plain how "Satan succeeded" and "by the action of our own brethren" "the light that is to lighten the whole earth with its glory was resisted, ... [and] has been in a great degree kept away from the world." This heart alienation from Christ that caused the rejection of the 1888 message is today far more subtle, more sophisticated, and more deeply buried beyond our consciousness--but it is no less real.
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