Dear Brother ___________,

Thank you for contacting the Ellen G. White Estate. I'll be glad to try to answer your questions.

1. Fannie Bolton worked for Mrs. White for a time as one of her literary helpers. The other helpers described the kind of work they were asked to do: transcribing Mrs. White's handwritten material, improving the spelling and grammar where needed, and arranging the matter for the best flow of thought. Marian Davis, Mrs. White's most trusted helper, gathered material from Mrs. White's earlier writings and arranged them topically for books that they wanted to develop. She could also substitute some words if they made the point better. But even she served really as an editor, not as a writer of Mrs. White's books.

So was Steps to Christ written by editorial assistants, specifically by Fannie Bolton, as Mr. Ballenger claimed some years after both Mrs. White and Fannie Bolton were dead? D. E. Robinson, who had served as one of Mrs. White's secretaries, dealt with this question soon after it arose. As was the case with her other later books, Mrs. White had her staff gather statements from her previous writings and arrange them into an outline that they had developed. Mrs. White then reviewed the statements, wrote additional material as needed, and finally approved the manuscript to go to the press. Her assistants did not write the book. Critics have claimed that Fannie Bolton, one of those assistants, was the author of Steps to Christ, but one may locate passages in the book which were published elsewhere before Mrs. White even knew Fannie Bolton. Even without computers, Robinson located several such statements.

For more information on Fannie Bolton and her work for Mrs. White, see Herbert E. Douglass, Messenger of the Lord, pp. 479-482. On pp. 444, 445, Douglass gives some background material about the writing of Steps to Christ. See also Francis D. Nichol, Ellen G. White and Her Critics, pp. 481-485, where you can find some of the passages published by Mrs. White before 1888 (when Fannie Bolton came to work for her) in parallel columns with passages from Steps to Christ. You may have one or both of these books, but if you don't, you may still access the materials online, on our web site, www.WhiteEstate.org. On the menu at the left of the home page, click on "Online Books," and scroll down until you find the links to these books, and then navigate to the chapters containing the desired pages.

2. The meeting you are referring to was called a conference rather than a camp meeting. As I understand it, it was held in the Meeting House in Battle Creek. In the response above I mentioned Francis D. Nichol's book, Ellen G. White and Her Critics. Nichol dealt with this matter, and several others you have asked about, in that book more than 50 years ago. We adapted his treatment of this question for our web site. Here is the URL for that item: www.WhiteEstate. org/issues/1856visn.html.

3. Nichol also dealt with this one. Again, we adapted his answer for our web site. You will find this item in the "Issues & Answers" section (see the button by that name on the main menu at the left of our home page), subsection "Comments Regarding Unusual Statements Found in Ellen G. White's Writings." Under the subheading "Unfulfilled Predictions," this one is the first link.

4. James White and Ellen Harmon did learn of the Sabbath from Joseph Bates, in early 1846. At first they were not impressed. Mrs. White thought he was making entirely too much of just one commandment, when there were ten. But Bates wrote a tract on the Sabbath and sent them a copy. They read it and were convinced by the Bible evidence that he set forth there. They began to keep the Sabbath about the time of their marriage in August of 1846. Her first vision about the Sabbath came seven months later, in April of 1847. I don't know what you are referring to when you speak of their having "separated themselves from Joseph Bates of this Predictions of Christ return which did not come true." What do you have in mind here? Surely not the 1844 disappointment, which was well behind them. And certainly not Bates's speculations that Jesus would come in 1851, which Ellen White rejected soon after he issued them. So I just don't know what you have in mind here. Sorry! If you wish, tell me more of what you understand on this (or perhaps, what the critics have been saying), and I'll see if I can help you.

5. In many cases, people conclude that a certain item of Mrs. White's was for "her times" if they really don't want to admit that it applies to them! We all have that human tendency. Yet there are certain specific instructions that clearly relate to conditions that prevailed at the time, but not specifically to us today. For instance, in Education, pp. 216, 217, Mrs. White wrote, "And if girls, in turn, could learn to harness and drive a horse, and to use the saw and the hammer, as well as the rake and the hoe, they would be better fitted to meet the emergencies of life." Will learning to harness a horse to a wagon or carriage and drive it help a girl today meet the emergencies of life? Not in most of North America. But the same principle here, today, would lead a girl to learn to drive a car and change a tire. Even in items like this that don't seem to apply to us, we can usually find an underlying principle that does apply to the situations we face.

6. Regarding Mrs. White's identification of the seal of God in Revelation as the Sabbath, you are wondering if this contradicts Ephesians 1 and 2 Corinthians 1. I think it does not, because I believe that the passages are describing different things.

Let me illustrate. In the Bible, whom does the lion stand for? It depends on which verse you look at:

Rev. 5:5: "And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof."

1 Pet. 5:8: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."

So is a lion the symbol of Jesus or of Satan? It depends.

In other words, in different contexts you can find meanings for the same word or symbol that are directly opposite to one another. This does not make them contradictory, because the contexts are different. They are not speaking about the same thing.

I think we have a similar case in what you have asked about. Mrs. White would have no difficulty affirming the Holy Spirit as the seal (or perhaps the Sealer) of our redemption. In Ephesians 1:13, the Greek can be translated either "sealed with that holy Spirit", as it is in the KJV, or in the instrumental sense: "sealed by that Holy Spirit." In either case, it is the Holy Spirit who gives us our identity as being God's children. Mrs. White had no argument with this. She did not see the Sabbath as something causing or securing our salvation or earning us the right to be called God's children.

But in the book of Revelation, the seal of God is contrasted with the mark of the beast. And in that context in Revelation, it cannot be referring to the Holy Spirit, given at conversion as the assurance of our salvation. Notice, for example, how Rev. 7:3 has one of the angels saying, as earth's final events are taking shape, "Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads." They could not be His servants without first being converted, could they? And according to Romans 8:9, "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." So if they don't have the Holy Spirit, they don't belong to Christ. Therefore, if they are called "the servants of our God" in Rev. 7:3, they must already have the Holy Spirit. Even so, according to the same verse, they have not been sealed yet, because this angel is calling to the other angels to hold the winds of strife until these servants of God have been sealed. Clearly, then, the seal of God in this verse must refer to something other than the Holy Spirit, wouldn't you say so?

It would be a bit more involved for me to show you the Bible case for saying that the Sabbath is the seal of God in this context, but that was not really your question. Suffice it here to say that in Rev. 14:12 the people of God in the last crisis are identified as "they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." I only want to establish for you the fact that, if we are going to let the Bible interpret itself, we must be willing to recognize that in different contexts it may use the same terms in different ways. And in a given passage, Mrs. White may refer to one of those contexts and not the other. When she does so, she is not contradicting the other Scripture; she is referring to just one of them. Often in another place she will refer to the other, and then you can also see her harmony with it.

7. Mrs. White received her major great controversy vision on March 14, 1858. Later that year she wrote a book based on that vision. It was published in the Fall of 1858 as The Great Controversy between Christ and His Angels, and Satan and His Angels. It had 219 small pages. Today we call it Spiritual Gifts, vol. 1; later it was reproduced in Early Writings, comprising the major portion of that book. It covered the whole controversy briefly, with big gaps (most notably, it has nothing on the whole Old Testament after the fall of Adam and the promise of the Redeemer). She spent the rest of her life enlarging on this theme. In 1864 she published Spiritual Gifts, vols. 3 and 4, which filled in quite a bit of the Old Testament story. But soon she decided to enlarge the presentation into four larger volumes. These were what we call Spirit of Prophecy, vols. 1-4. Vol. 1 (1870) took the story from Lucifer's rebellion in heaven to the reign of Solomon. Vol. 2 (1877) took the story of Jesus as far as His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Vol. 3 (1878) told the rest of the story of Jesus and the story of the apostles. Vol. 4 (1884) covered the same time frame as our current book The Great Controversy. In 1885 Mrs. White left for Europe and spent two years there, in some cases seeing with her physical eye some places she had seen only in vision in connection with the middle ages and the Reformation. During that time, back in America, the literature evangelists were finding that they could sell her vol. 4 quite well door-to-door. In fact, they sold some 50,000 copies that way between 1884 and 1888. The brethren in Europe asked her permission to translate the volume into the major European languages, but she refused. She wanted to tell the story still more fully, especially in regard to the events in Europe, and with a non-Adventist audience in mind. She returned home in 1887, and the next year a revised and enlarged Great Controversy volume came from the press (1888), with the title The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan During the Christian Dispensation. She was going to expand the four-volume set to five larger volumes, and GC was the first. Two years later, in 1890, she brought out Patriarchs and Prophets. Then she went to Australia, and while there completed The Desire of Ages (1898). After she returned home in 1900, she issued a number of other books on different topics, but in 1-1 The Acts of the Apostles was published, and also a revision of The Great Controversy, with the subtitle "The Conflict of the Ages in the Christian Dispensation." The final volume, Prophets and Kings, was nearly completed when she died. Her staff completed the final two chapters from materials she had written earlier, and the book was published in 1-7. You can see how each stage was an attempt to tell the story more fully and better than she had done before. Along the way she had been receiving further visions on various parts of it, and she incorporated these things into the later publications. This is why there are differences. At the end of the process, she expressed her satisfaction with the latest books (see Selected Message, book 3, pp. 123, 124 for her statement, and the Appendices of that book for W. C. White's explanation of the work that they did.

Sometimes people are distressed (or in the critics' case, incensed) over the fact that she could do such revision and expansion. Usually, I think, these reactions stem from an incorrect understanding of inspiration. Some people seem to think that God dictated the books to the prophets, and that therefore they must be perfect in every way just as they are. Any change would be a step away from this perfection and would be unnecessary, since the Lord would get it exactly right the first time. But this is not how inspiration works, whether for the Bible writers or Mrs. White. God gave them their messages, but they expressed these in their own words and ways, within their human limitations. So you can easily see a difference in style between the writings of John and of Paul in the Bible, for instance. Inspiration did not override their humanity, either, as you will see if you read 1 Corinthians 1:14-16. Paul makes a statement, then backtracks on it, then finally says he doesn't remember. This is clearly not an example of God's having dictated the message to him. But this glimpse of his humanity in no way compromises the message he is giving. Further, Paul's Greek is better than Peter's or John's. Mrs. White, having had little formal education, did not always write or speak perfect English, either. And as God gave further light, she reworked and expanded the earlier presentations to reflect that light. Such revising is compatible with a correct understanding of how inspiration functions. To review Mrs. White's own understanding of these things, read the Introduction to the book The Great Controversy and also the first 40 pages or so of Selected Messages, book 1.

I hope this will help. Thank you for writing, and God bless!