The Desire of Wages

Chapter 2 - A Life of Christ for the Market

by Dirk Anderson

Most Christians who set out to write about the life of Jesus start with a sense of awe. Ellen White started with a sales plan. In 1880 she wrote to her son Willie and listed the books she meant to produce that winter. Number six on the list read: “Life of Christ, both books. The most sharp and interesting matter in one large book for canvassers to use for public sale.”¹

Not “the most faithful to Scripture.” Not “the clearest presentation of the gospel.” The most sharp and interesting, packed into one large book, for canvassers, for public sale. Eighteen years before The Desire of Ages appeared, its author already knew what kind of product it had to be. This chapter traces how that plan grew from one book into a whole line of them, each one feeding the next.

“With a Different Title”

White had already written about the life of Christ twice. In 1858 the first volume of Spiritual Gifts covered it in a few short chapters that stayed close to the Bible. It was less than sixty pages of material. At this stage of the movement, the life of Christ was not an important subject for Adventists. In that same series, White spent an entire book—300 pages—describing her own ministry.² The emphasis is telling.

In 1877 and 1878 she expanded the story into the second and third volumes of The Spirit of Prophecy. Even then she was thinking about marketing. In 1876, as the Spirit of Prophecy volumes were getting prepared for the press, she wrote to Willie and his wife: “I have thought if the covers were made for all three volumes, with a different title and these books were introduced in the bookstores in Boston, Rochester, Battle Creek and other places, it would scatter the light and do good.”³

Same books, new covers, new title, new market. Keep that idea in mind, because it comes back again and again. The SDA sect’s leaders would later suggest issuing her life of Christ “in two volumes, perhaps under somewhat different titles, the two together to make a set, and still each one be complete in itself.”⁴ That is exactly what happened. The material on Christ was cut, recut, retitled and repackaged until it filled four books with four sets of royalties.

The European Life of Christ

The “one large book” White dreamed of in 1880 did not first appear in English. It appeared in Europe. In 1883 the General Conference voted that “Sr. White’s ‘Life of Christ’ shall be published in the Danish-Norwegian language,” and in French, German and Swedish as well.⁵ There was no one-volume book by that name. What existed were the two Spirit of Prophecy volumes. So her staff made one. They took printed copies of the old volumes and marked them up for the translators. One copy in the White Estate vault is labeled “marked for the German Life of Christ” and was to be returned to “M. A. [Marian] Davis.” Another, “for the French Life of Christ,” went out in May 1884, full of “notes, markings, and insertions for the translators.”⁶

Out of those marked-up pages came a single-volume Life of Christ: Jesu Kristi liv in Danish-Norwegian (1885), Kristi lefnad in Swedish (1886), Das Leben Jesu Christi in German and La vie de Jésus-Christ in French (1887), and later Finnish. It had a new opening chapter, “The Plan of Redemption,” the old chapters were divided up, and there was “new matter.” One translator found the English so “wordy” that he asked permission to shorten the sentences. In Norway the book was even bound in two volumes to “facilitate the sale.”⁷ That paid off for White. As late as 1899 the German house reported “about $330 royalty here from Life of Christ” awaiting White’s disposition.⁸

English-speaking SDAs never saw it. W. C. White was so pleased with its sales in Scandinavia that he wanted an English edition, but his mother wanted to add more first, and the plan was dropped.⁹ As late as 1890 the Bible Echo in Australia was advertising the 600-page volume as “Issued only in French, German, Swedish, and Danish,” while English readers were told to buy the old two-volume set.¹⁰

The Missing Link

This forgotten European book is the bridge between the Spirit of Prophecy of 1877–78 and The Desire of Ages of 1898. Even SDA scholars call it “a missing link.” Its 55 chapters appear in The Desire of Ages in almost exactly the same order.¹¹ Marian Davis told Edson White exactly how she used it:

Ten or eleven years ago, when her Life of Christ was published in French and German, the matter was arranged and prepared with the counsel of sister White, W. C. W., M. K. W., and sister E. J. Burnham. The decisions then reached have guided me also in the preparation of the chapters of the new book. . . . In the suggestions made as to detail and arrangement, I have followed, as nearly as seemed feasible, the French L. C.¹²

Notice who made the decisions: a committee of White, her son, her daughter-in-law and two literary assistants. Notice also what kind of decisions they were. In the same letter Davis explained the editorial rule they had followed:

Since these books are sent out without explanation as to the authority by which the author speaks, it was thought best to avoid, as far as we could, statements for which the Bible seems to furnish no proof, or which to the ordinary reader appear to contradict the Bible. Better to give the readers what they will accept . . . than to excite criticism and questioning that will lead them to discredit the whole.¹³

“Better to give the readers what they will accept.” That is not how prophets handle revelation. It is how publishers handle a product.

The European book also added new material, and much of that material went straight into The Desire of Ages. In our comparison of the French text with the Spirit of Prophecy, about one paragraph in nine had no counterpart in the earlier English books, and dozens of those new paragraphs reappear in The Desire of Ages. Here is one, from Christ’s agony:

In 1878 there was one sentence. In the European book there was a paragraph. In The Desire of Ages the paragraph is still there. Wherever that new material came from, and in later chapters we will see that some of it came from other men’s books, the European Life of Christ is where it first entered White’s life of Christ. It was the rough draft of The Desire of Ages, assembled by her staff, adjusted to give readers “what they will accept,” and sold in four languages before English-speaking SDAs ever heard of it.

Riding the Holiness Wave

Why did the life of Christ suddenly move to the front of White’s work in the 1890s? Follow the market. In the decades after the Civil War a revival swept through the Protestant world. It went by several names: the Higher Life movement, the holiness movement, the victorious life. Its message was warm and simple. Christians did not have to live defeated lives. Through full consecration and simple faith they could enter a life of rest, victory and joy in Christ. William Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life (1858) helped launch it. Hannah Whitall Smith’s The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875) became one of the best-selling devotional books of the century. From 1875 the annual Keswick Convention in England carried the message across the English-speaking world, and writers such as Andrew Murray and F. B. Meyer turned it into a steady stream of small, inexpensive devotional books. Dwight L. Moody’s revivals spread the same Christ-centered piety to millions on both sides of the Atlantic.

The SDA sect was on the outside looking in. For decades its books had been about the Sabbath, the law, the sanctuary and the prophecies, and other Christians regarded SDAs as legalists. Then came the General Conference of 1888 at Minneapolis, where A. T. Jones and E. J. Waggoner preached righteousness by faith. The next summer the pair of SDA holiness preachers were drawing large crowds at SDA campmeetings. Witnessing their rising popularity, White decided to take their side and endorsed them. She quickly came to the conclusion that the sect needed books about Jesus, but she had precious little to offer. Her life of Christ was buried in the old Spirit of Prophecy volumes, read almost entirely by SDAs.

White knew the holiness literature well. Her private library held a copy of Boardman’s Higher Christian Life bearing her own signature, along with Andrew Murray’s Abide in Christ. Her office shelves held books by Meyer and Moody. Many of them carried the imprint of the same Chicago publisher: Fleming H. Revell, the “publisher of evangelical literature” who was making a fortune selling the holiness revival to the Protestant world.¹⁷

The timing was not coincidental. White wanted a piece of that market. Stories on the life of Christ were selling big, so she decided to jump onto that bandwagon.

The Little Book That Went to Revell

The first piece of the life of Christ to reach the public was not a life of Christ at all. In the fall of 1891, at a camp near Petoskey, Michigan, White handed Elder George B. Starr a stack of typewritten pages. “This is a compilation of matter from my writings, by Miss Marion Davis,” she told him, “and she thinks it ought to be published.” Starr later recalled that he suggested sending it to Fleming H. Revell of Chicago, “brother-in-law of Dwight L. Moody,” to get it into the hands of Christians outside the SDA sect.¹⁸ Whether Starr, writing forty years after-the-fact, rightly recalled all the details is a matter of debate. Fannie would later claim authorship of the book. Regardless, the compilation became Steps to Christ, the author was listed as Ellen White, and it landed on the same list as Moody, Murray, Meyer and Hannah Whitall Smith.

The deal was a good one for the author. Revell agreed to pay ten per cent of the retail price, and he reminded the Whites that “no subscription work we believe ever pays more than 5%.”¹⁹ Even so, W. C. White had a second agenda. Before the book was even off the press, he was asking for the right to reuse its contents in “a larger work.”²⁰ Marian Davis was worried about the same problem from the other side. “It would be quite a task,” she wrote, “after the book is completed to remove from L. C. [Life of Christ] all the sentences and paragraphs that have been used in ‘Steps.’”²¹ Steps to Christ had been carved out of the same pile of material, and now its pieces had to be fitted back in without breaking the contract.

Revell eventually allowed it, with a condition: “Only extracts and not full chapters or such portions as would detract from the sale of the present book.”²² So the words of the “inspired” book were governed by a publisher’s contract, and the question was not whether God wanted them repeated but whether repeating them would hurt sales.

The Same Shelf

Revell himself knew exactly which shelf the book belonged on. When he asked the Whites to accept a lower royalty in 1892, he pointed to his best-known holiness author: Mrs. H. W. Smith, he wrote, had “gladly consented to accept $.05 per copy royalty on the $.75 book.”²³ White’s little book was priced the same as Smith’s, sold by the same house, and measured against the same royalty.

Put the two tables of contents side by side and the structural resemblance is obvious.

Consecration, faith, doubt, growth, service, joy: the stations of the Higher Life, in a small cloth-bound volume at seventy-five cents. SDAs are told that Steps to Christ was a heaven-sent message for the whole world. In 1892 it was a holiness book for the holiness market, with no Sabbath, no sanctuary and no prophecy in it to frighten off the buyer. (For more information on the background of this book, who wrote it, and where the material came from, see the article Who Wrote Steps to Christ?)

Outreach to Whom?

SDAs have long been told that Steps to Christ was placed with a non-SDA publisher so that the wider Christian world could benefit from its message. It sounds like a noble missionary strategy. But the sales figures tell a very different story. Eighteen months after publication, Revell himself wrote to W. C. White: “Of course, the sale is more largely among the S.D.A. people.”²⁴ By 1895, the sect's own book agency was even more candid: “we do not think it would be very hard to prove that at least nine tenths of these books have been sold to our tract societies, and we think that the percentage is even larger than that.”²⁵

Nine out of ten copies—or more—were going right back into the SDA distribution system. The book was sold primarily to SDAs, through SDA tract societies, and by SDA canvassers. So much for reaching the wider Christian world! Meanwhile, the arrangement conveniently gave White double the royalty she could have earned from an SDA subscription book. And when the Review and Herald finally purchased the plates and copyright from Revell in 1896, its manager reported that the book “was practically dead.”²⁶ The supposed outreach success had largely been an internal SDA market, and even that market had apparently run its course.

Did White express disappointment that the book had failed to make a substantial impression beyond the sect? Did she lament that the wider Christian world had not embraced its message? Not at all. In 1897, she wrote with satisfaction:

I have received quite a sum of money, more than has come to me from some books; and I think more would come to me if he had more of my books to handle.²⁷

That is what mattered to White: the money she had received and the prospect of receiving more. The exchange makes the commercial nature of the relationship even harder to disguise. Revell had sent White samples of books he was already selling about the childhood of Jesus. He wanted her to prepare something on the same subject that “would find a more ready sale than any they had on hand.” White's response in the same letter was: “I shall place more books in his hand as soon as I can get them prepared, for I can receive better satisfaction than I have received from the Battle Creek publishing house.”

"Better satisfaction" is a thinly veiled acknowledgement of higher royalties.

A commercial publisher surveys the competition, identifies a marketable subject, and asks the prophet to produce a book that will outsell the titles already on his shelves. The prophet is excited about the prospect. This was a publisher looking for a better-selling product—and an author eager to put more books in his hands.

The SDA explanation is that Revell was chosen to spread the message beyond the sect. The contemporary records reveal something quite different: an overwhelmingly SDA customer base, a more lucrative royalty arrangement for White, a publisher concerned with sales, and an author eager for more business. The missionary explanation sounds impressive. The correspondence tells us what was actually happening.

Spinning Off the Sermon on the Mount

The next piece to break off was the Sermon on the Mount. In 1892 W. C. White was already offering Revell “another work entitled ‘The Sermon on the Mount.’”²⁸ By 1895 Marian Davis was assembling it, and her letters read like a printer’s worksheet. First she had to make the book bigger: “A considerable time was spent, at Sr. White’s request, in enlarging the book.” Then she had to make it smaller, to fit the page count: “Have not cut what I was willing to spare, so much as what could best be spared. . . . it seemed a mathematical necessity that something should go.” She even proposed the title phrase: “For running title how would it do to use ‘From The Mount Of Blessing’?”²⁹ For the appearance of the book she already had a model in mind: “Meyer’s little books on Moses and Abraham,” the holiness preacher’s popular devotional volumes.³⁰

W. C. White had his eye on the market. “To make the Copyright effective, it must be issued simultaneously in England, and America,” he wrote. “To sell well, it must be well illustrated.” The price was fixed before the book was finished: seventy-five cents in America, two shillings in England and the colonies.³¹

Then, Ellen White did something that would come back to haunt her. In July 1895 she sold the foreign rights to Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing to the General Conference Association for five hundred dollars, payable “to Mrs. E. G. White.”³² Less than a year later, she was sending Battle Creek her famous testimony that “no greater dishonor can be done to God than for one finite agent to purchase from men their God-given talent, or the product of such talent.” The completed sale was later “declared off” because, the Review and Herald explained, “the deal was not satisfactory to the author.”³³ Selling the product of her talent was fine as long as the price suited her.

The little book was not exactly a cash cow. White shared her disappointment: “I expected that the sale of Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing would help me,” she wrote in 1897. “The means I hoped to obtain have not answered my expectations.”³⁴

The Big Book

Meanwhile the “one large book for canvassers” was still the main event. The sect’s leaders understood exactly how it was to be sold. When W. C. White suggested letting Revell handle it in bookstores, the General Conference Association disagreed. The life of Christ was a subscription book, and “one of the strong points of the agent, in making a sale, is that the book can only be obtained by subscription, and not through the regular book stores.”³⁵ The canvasser at the door had to be the only way to get it.

White shopped the manuscript between publishers, as we saw in Chapter 1, and in July 1896 she pulled it away from Battle Creek altogether: “I cannot conscientiously have my book go through the press at Battle Creek. . . . I shall not place Life of Christ in their hands.”³⁶ It went to the Pacific Press in California.

Marian Davis, meanwhile, was reshaping the book with the buyer in mind. In March 1897 she warned the publisher that the chapters had “a very serious defect”: too many of them began “as if the book were the diary of an itinerant minister.” She rearranged the openings, demanded new decorated first pages, and assured the publisher, “I know that it will sell enough better to warrant the delay and expense.”³⁷ Notice what drove the editing. Not a fresh revelation, but sales.

Naming the Product

A product needs a name, and this one went through several. Among the titles floated were “Christ Our Brother,” “The Sunlight of Heaven” and “The Desire of Nations.”³⁸ The winner did not come from a vision. It came from E. M. Morrison, who wrote to the Pacific Press manager in August 1896 suggesting “THE DESIRE OF AGES,” a phrase “suggested by ‘the desire of ages long’, an expression referring to Christ in Havergal’s Poems, page 21.”³⁹ Davis passed the choice along: “Sister White prefers the former, as I do.”⁴⁰

So the most famous title in SDA literature was picked by a committee from a line of English poetry. The prophet’s role was to sign off on it.

Steps to Christ as Bait

When The Desire of Ages finally appeared at the end of 1898, the little Revell book was put back to work. The Review and Herald manager explained the plan to W. C. White: “We conceived the idea a short time ago of using this little book as a sort of forerunner, or entering wedge for ‘Desire of Ages.’” Fifty thousand copies would be printed at a reduced price, and SDA members would buy four copies for a dollar and sell them to their neighbors.⁴¹ A paper edition carried “a good strong ad for ‘Desire of Ages.’”⁴²

The circle was complete. Steps to Christ had been cut out of the life of Christ material. Its sentences had been fitted back into the life of Christ. And now it was being handed out as a sales lead for the life of Christ.

The Product Line

• 1885–1897 – The European Life of Christ. The two Spirit of Prophecy volumes marked up by her staff, rearranged and enlarged into one volume; sold in Danish-Norwegian, Swedish, German, French and Finnish, never in English.
• 1892 – Steps to Christ. Compiled by Marian Davis and/or Fannie Bolton; sold through Revell at ten per cent royalty; later used as an “entering wedge” for The Desire of Ages.
• 1896 – Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing. Enlarged, then cut to fit, by Davis; foreign rights sold for $500, then the sale “declared off.”
• 1898 – The Desire of Ages. The “one large book for canvassers,” sold by subscription only, in bindings from $3.00 to $7.00.
• 1900 – Christ’s Object Lessons. The parables, held back from the big book and published as a book of their own.

A Gospel in Four Bindings

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write a product line. They did not test-market their Gospels in Europe first, and they did not time their Gospels to catch a revival. They did not issue their Gospels in installments, reserve the reuse rights, test titles, or time one book to promote the next. Luke wrote one account so that Theophilus “mightest know the certainty of those things” (Luke 1:4). White’s life of Christ, by contrast, was planned from the start as “one large book for canvassers to use for public sale,” and the material was divided among as many books as the market would bear.

None of this was hidden from the men who ran the business. But it was hidden from the people who bought the books. They were told they were reading the overflow of a prophet’s visions. They were not told that the “prophet” had a book-maker who cut and enlarged her material to fit the page count, chose its titles and rewrote its chapter openings to boost sales. In the next chapter we meet the literary genius behind Ellen White's greatest books.