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Messenger of the Lord - Contents
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    The Witness of Uriah Smith

    This kind of response happened from the earliest days of her ministry. Undaunted men like Joseph Bates became convinced through personal experience. 20See p. 145. Strong-willed men who had their own Biblical viewpoints could have divided the early group of Sabbatarian Adventists before they even organized as a church. Uriah Smith, in a sermon delivered at the 1891 General Conference, recalled his own personal experience of forty years: “Our relation to it [ministry of Ellen White] is our relation to something which arose with this work, which has gone right forward with it, side by side, which has interwoven itself into and through it, and all about it, from the day this message began until this present hour.”MOL 516.6

    Smith described the potential chaos of those early days when men and women “came with almost as many different views on some points as there were individuals ... each one pressing his own individual ideas. Then the value of the Spirit of prophecy in connection with this work, again appeared. It pointed out the right course to pursue. And what was it? It was that the brethren should sink all their minor differences and their peculiarities of lesser importance, and unite in the one great movement of the third angel’s message. These examples are merely an index of what it has done all the way along—guarding against giving up the truths of the past, and pointing the way to light and truth in the future.” 21General Conference Daily Bulletin, March 14, 1891, p. 151. In 1868, Uriah Smith published a small brochure entitled, The Visions of Mrs. E. G. White, A Manifestation of Spiritual Gifts According to the Scriptures. In reviewing the fruit of her ministry, he wrote: “They lead to the purest morality .... They lead us to Christ.... They lead us to the Bible.... They have brought comfort and consolation to many hearts.” Then he noted the “blindest prejudice, the intensest hate, and most malignant bitterness” aimed at Ellen White. Smith grouped these adversaries into two groups: “The first class is composed of those who believe, or did believe at the time their opposition commenced, the views held by Seventh-day Adventists, but in whom, or in someone with whom they sympathized, wrongs were pointed out and reproved by the visions.... The other class consists of those who are the avowed and open opponents of all the distinguished views held by Seventh-day Adventists.... They hate that system of truth with which the visions stand connected, and they attack the visions as the most sure and effectual way of hindering the progress of that truth.” Pages 6-10.MOL 516.7

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