The Disclosure of Strange Criticism

In Wisconsin James and Ellen White learned of some of the reports and rumors that, unbeknown to them, had been current even at the time of the General Conference in May. This criticism, they could now see, constituted a part of the basis for the coldness with which they were treated in Battle Creek. Ellen White gives one example:2BIO 198.7

It was said that my husband was so crazy for money that he had engaged in selling old bottles. The facts are these: When we were about to move, I asked my husband what we should do with a lot of old bottles on hand. Said he: “Throw them away.”2BIO 199.1

Just then our Willie [age 12] came in and offered to clean and sell them. I told him to do so, and he should have what he could get for them. And when my husband rode to the post office, he took Willie and the bottles into the carriage. He could do no less for his faithful little son. Willie sold the bottles and took the money.2BIO 199.2

On the way to the post office my husband took a brother connected with the Review office into the carriage, who conversed pleasantly with him as they rode to and from town, and because he saw Willie come out to the carriage and ask his father a question relative to the value of the bottles, and then saw the druggist in conversation with my husband relative to that which so much interested Willie, this brother, without saying one word to my husband about the matter, immediately reported that Brother White had been downtown selling old bottles and therefore must be crazy. The first we heard about the bottles was ...five months later.—Testimonies for the Church, 1:605, 606.2BIO 199.3

“These things have been kept from us,” commented Ellen White, “so that we could not correct them, and have been carried, as on the wings of the wind, by our professed friends.”—Ibid., 1:606.2BIO 199.4

The four-day convocation in Johnstown and the similar meeting following in Iowa were forerunners of Seventh-day Adventist camp meetings, which were to find such an important place in the history of the church. The Johnstown meeting closed Sunday evening; the Iowa convocation was to open at Pilot Grove the next Thursday, September 26.2BIO 199.5