The Desire of Wages

Chapter 18 - The SDA Defenses Answered

by Dirk Anderson

For more than a century, whenever someone has pointed out where The Desire of Ages came from, or where its royalties went, SDA defenders have had answers ready. Some come from the White Estate, some from SDA professors, some from the prophet herself. They are repeated so often that many SDAs assume they must be true. This chapter takes them one at a time and holds each one up against the record.

“Her Assistants Only Fixed Her Grammar”

This is the oldest defense, and it was first made while the book was being assembled. In August 1897, with newspapers accusing White of using her testimonies to protect her royalties, the Review’s co-editor G. C. Tenney gave SDAs this guarantee in print: “we know that word by word her own pen traces those volumes. She does not write by dictation, but with her own hands; and in those writings no changes more than those of a verbal nature are made by the copyist and editor.”¹

In the same article Tenney quoted a letter from White herself: “I have to pay my workers to prepare my books.”² Not to copy them. To prepare them. Chapters 3 and 4 showed what that meant. White called Marian Davis “my book-maker.” Davis gathered the material from articles, letters and diaries, arranged it, retitled the chapters and wrote that she had “spent too many years’ work on this book to have anything go wrong.” The sect’s own investigator, Fred Veltman, concluded that “Ellen White’s literary assistants, particularly Marian Davis, are responsible for the published form of The Desire of Ages,” and that Davis deserved credit for its “literary style and construction.”³ He could not find a single chapter in White’s handwriting, “not even a secretarial copy of a single DA chapter as typed from an Ellen White handscript.”⁴

“Word by word her own pen” was not true in 1897, and the evidence has only grown since.

“Everyone Copied in Those Days”

The next defense admits the copying and excuses it. Nineteenth-century religious writers, it says, used one another’s work freely. Literary standards were looser. What we call plagiarism was common practice.

Chapter 6 showed that Veltman tried this defense and that his own report undid it. The writers White copied credited their sources. Hanna “did give proper credit for quotations.” Cumming footnoted his debts to Trench and Olshausen.⁵ The standard of the day was to name your sources, and her sources did so.

White herself knew the standard. In 1893, when a critic named Stanton printed selections from her testimonies in a pamphlet, she protested that he had done it “without my consent,” taking her words “out of their connection” and placing them “in the frame-work of error.”⁶ In 1896 she laid down as 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.”⁷ She understood very well that a writer’s words belonged to the writer. She simply did not apply the rule to Hanna, Harris, Cumming, Geikie, Farrar, March or anyone else she plagiarized from.

The “common practice” defense misses the main point. A novelist or a preacher who copies a paragraph has broken a literary rule. A prophet who copies a paragraph and presents it as light from heaven has done something far worse. She has sullied the prophetic office. When people wondered how she knew things, she answered: “Some one has told me,—He who does not falsify.”⁸ The question is not whether other authors copied. The question is whether God’s messenger may sell other men’s words as His.

“She Used Their Words to Describe What She Saw”

The most popular modern defense says that White was shown the scenes of Christ’s life in vision, and then reached for the best words she could find, some of them in other books, to describe what she had seen. The sources supplied the language. God supplied the content.

Part Three of this book is the answer. If White saw the events, how did she see Geikie’s son of the law at twelve, Krummacher’s false-messiah Barabbas, Hanna’s Emmaus words on the cross, or a wall that survived Nebuchadnezzar? Those were not in the events. They were in the books. A shared mistake proves that the content, not just the wording, came from the source.

Veltman reached the same conclusion from a different direction. In the fifteen chapters he studied he found no mention of vision as a source at all.⁹ He found that the extra-biblical details that SDAs most often treat as revealed “clearly reveal the influence of other writers,” and he warned: “A detail not found in the biblical text may not with certainty be attributed to Ellen White’s visions.”¹⁰ In the end he concluded that the content of the book “is for the most part derived rather than original.”¹¹ Not the wording only. The content.

“Veltman Cleared Her”

SDAs often quote the last pages of Veltman’s report, where he gave his “personal opinion” that White “was not a plagiarist.” Chapter 6 dealt with this. Veltman also wrote that his project “did not treat the question of plagiarism,” and in the same passage conceded that “Ellen White used literary sources, even verbatim quotes, without giving credit to her sources.”¹² He called her “non-admission or even denial of dependency” “a very serious question that still remains,” and he found the White Estate’s own explanation “much too limited.”¹³ A verdict of “not guilty” from a judge who says he did not try the case, and who then lists the evidence of guilt, is not an acquittal.

“The Bible Writers Used Sources Too”

This defense sounds strongest, so it deserves a careful answer. It is true that biblical writers used sources. Luke says so in his first sentence: “many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things,” and he had “perfect understanding of all things from the very first” (Luke 1:1–3). The Chronicler sends readers to “the book of Samuel the seer, and . . . the book of Nathan the prophet, and . . . the book of Gad the seer” (1 Chronicles 29:29). Paul quotes a Greek poet and says so: “as certain also of your own poets have said” (Acts 17:28). Jude names the book he quotes: “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these” (Jude 14).

Notice the difference. The Bible writers told their readers. Luke announced his research. The Chronicler named his sources. Paul credited the poets. Jude named Enoch. The Desire of Ages names none of the books it copied from, and its author denied that any human being had told her what she wrote.

There is a second difference. No apostle drew a royalty on his Gospel or took a one-third interest in an edition of it. Paul worked with his hands so that he would not be a burden: “I have coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel” (Acts 20:33).

“She Gave the Money Away”

The defense SDAs reach for most often is the generosity of Christ’s Object Lessons. At the end of 1899 White offered the manuscript of that book to relieve the debts of the sect’s schools. She described the gift herself in 1910:

I pledged the Lord to give the manuscript for the book Christ’s Object Lessons. . . . I paid my workers who had helped to prepare the manuscript for publication, and then I relinquished all claims on any royalty that might otherwise have accrued from its sale. This was my donation to the cause. . . . The managers of our publishing houses published this book without any profit to their offices, and the brethren and sisters in the different churches gave of their time to sell it to their friends and neighbors. . . . between two and three hundred thousand dollars came into the treasury.¹⁴

Her gift was the royalties on one book. Everything else was given by other people. The publishers’ plan, adopted in January 1900, shows who carried the cost. The Pacific Press was to furnish all the illustrations free. The Review and Herald was to set the type and make four sets of plates free. Both houses were to supply the books for a year at the cost of the raw material. When the plan was first proposed, the Review’s manager calculated that supplying the books would cost his house alone about $30,000, “by far more than we can expend for this purpose,” and the board would agree only to furnish them at the cost of the raw material.¹⁵ The members sold the books for nothing, and the public paid for them. The two or three hundred thousand dollars came from the buyers, the canvassers and the publishing houses. White gave up her percentage.

That was a real sacrifice, and it should be acknowledged. But it was one book, and it came in the same year as a letter in which she reported the light she had received on giving: “The light given me was never to make large donations to any phase of the work, never again to place myself in an embarrassing position.”¹⁶ Her other royalties, on The Desire of Ages, The Great Controversy, Patriarchs and Prophets and the rest, kept coming in. And her own description of the gift contains one more admission: Christ’s Object Lessons, too, was a book that hired workers “helped to prepare.”

As for the foreign royalties “dedicated to missions,” Chapter 17 showed where they went: into a fund under her control, spent translating her own books and buying plates she owned.

“She Was Never Rich; She Died in Debt”

It is true that White was often in debt. But look at where the debt came from. In 1903 she explained it herself: “Ten thousand dollars of this debt was incurred before I went to Australia. I went to large expense in bringing out the illustrated editions of Great Controversy and Patriarchs and Prophets and in making four sets of plates of each. This was done with the expectation of large sales.” And again: “While I was in Australia, I went to large expense in bringing out Desire of Ages.”¹⁷ This is the debt of a publisher who invests in her own product expecting it to sell. Debt from buying printing plates is not poverty. It is capital.

“But the Book Has Blessed Millions”

When every other defense fails, this one remains. People have read The Desire of Ages and been drawn to Christ. That is true, and that is to be applauded.

But think about where the blessing came from. It came from the Gospels, which the book quotes on almost every page. It came from William Hanna, John Harris, John Cumming, Daniel March and the other Christian writers whose best sentences fill its chapters, and whose names were removed. A reader blessed by a paragraph of Harris in The Desire of Ages has been blessed by Harris, not White. The question this book has asked is not whether The Desire of Ages contains good material. It does. The question is whether the good material was honestly come by, honestly credited and honestly sold.

Every defense in this chapter has the same weakness. Each one asks SDAs to judge White by a lower standard than the one she set for others, and far lower than the one the Bible sets for a prophet. She told the publishers that taking the product of another man’s talent was the greatest dishonor that could be done to God. She told SDAs that the Spirit could never contradict the Word. She told the faithful that “He who does not falsify” was the one who told her what she knew. Measured by her own words, the defenses fail.