Life Sketches (1880)

AUTHOR: White, Ellen Gould Harmon and James White

This book outlines the history and convictions of the Seventh-Day Adventists and promotes veganism and Temperance for religious and moral reasons. A kind of joint spiritual memoir of James White and Ellen Gould Harmon White, the book provides an “outline” of “the cause espoused by S. D. Adventists” (n. pag.). James White describes his childhood, upbringing, education, and spiritual awakening and development. Ellen White's contributions concern her early life, upbringing, spiritual visions, and marriage and joint religious work with James White. These parts of the text, quoted verbatim from the second volume of Spiritual Gifts, describe how she and her husband refrained from eating any animal products (278) and voice concern for animal welfare: “My feelings were very sensitive. I dreaded giving pain to any living creature. When I saw animals ill-treated my heart ached for them” (152). The book also discusses the Seventh-Day Adventists' publishing endeavors.

Towards the end of the volume, James White provides an account, including several illustrations, of the formation and development of Battle Creek College that provided vegan meals twice each day. Whilst this offered students economic advantages, “the victories gained in adopting the restricted diet,” White writes,

are of far more importance to young men and women who are preparing by study to bless others with their influence, than simply the sum of money saved. However important this may be to the poor student, dollars and cents can hardly compare with the moral value of practical lessons of self-control, and physical and mental culture. All scientific physicians in the land, who have not lost proper regard for truth and honesty, agree in testifying that a nutritious, hygienic diet is the safest and best for the young student. Most of our students are conforming to hygienic rules of living, and, as a consequence, sickness is almost unknown among them, and they are able to make greater progress in their studies (373).

White emphasizes the variety and quality of these meals, as the “young gentlemen and ladies of the Hygienic Boarding Clubs of Battle Creek College feast twice each day on the best grains, fruits, and vegetables, at a cost of about one dollar a week. With them the keen relish of healthful appetite, secured by their restricted diet, far exceeds the gustatory enjoyment of the sweetened, spiced, salted, and buttered dishes of fashionable living. Thank God for health reform,” he exclaims. “It is a mighty lever to lift up the student to physical, mental, and moral improvement” (373-374).

The book includes a chapter promoting “Christian temperance” (376). White reports that most Seventh-Day Adventists abstain from tobacco, tea, coffee, and alcohol use, and he expresses his hope that with the introduction of “the recent health and temperance movement” by John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, all “harmful indulgences will be purged from the denomination forever” (378-379). Members of the denomination are “expected to sign” a “teetotal pledge” (380). He then reports on the establishment of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, to counter “the irreligious influences of existing health institutions” (383). White  emphasizes once more the economic advantages of teetotalism, abstention from tobacco, coffee, and tea, as well as of the vegan diet which, he writes,

consisting of the grains, vegetables, and fruits, which are indeed the fat of the land, is far less expensive than the food usually eaten, of flesh, butter, sweet-cake, and pies, lard, saleratus, pepper, vinegar, pickles, allspice, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. When we first discarded these, and purchased for our family only such articles as flour, meal, vegetables, and fruits, we were surprised to see how little it cost to live (385).

However, White stresses that these economic benefits are outstripped by spiritual and moral gains:

But the money saved by the health reform is hardly worthy to be compared with the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual benefits derived from correct habits of life. Health is man's capital, the value of which cannot be computed in dollars and cents. And self-denial of hurtful indulgences strengthens and elevates the moral powers, while the mental and spiritual become clearer, with an improved physical condition (386).