Testimonies for the Church (1885-1909)

AUTHOR: White, Ellen Gould Harmon

KEYWORDS: Abolition, dress reform, education, food, health reform, religion

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

The first volume of Testimonies for the Church contains brief sections addressed to “Errors in Diet” and “Healthful Cookery” (I 204-209, I 680-687). The testimonies in this first volume also touch on the questions of slavery, dress reform, and health reform more generally. White professes that from her early years, she “dreaded giving pain to any living creature. When I saw animals ill-treated, my heart ached for them”(I 25), which she links to her own experience of cruelty and suffering. Generally, she advocates for a healthful and spare diet: “we must have the right kind of food, prepared in a right manner” (I 682), which means “without the use of lard, butter, or flesh-meats” (I 681). Doubts about dietary reform she ascribes to the workings of evil: “Some,” she writes, “think that they cannot reform, that health would be sacrificed should they attempt to leave the use of tea, tobacco, and flesh-meats. This is the suggestion of Satan” (I 548). She condemns chattel slavery in the strongest terms, calling it a “high crime,” “sin,” and “curse,” and describing the Fugitive Slave Law as being “in direct opposition to the teaching of Christ” (I 264). Her view of women's clothing is that it should be “modest, comfortable, convenient, and healthful” (I 465).

White explicitly states that “God in his word expressly forbids” the use of “the fat of animals” (II 61). She contends that “if we subsist largely upon the flesh of dead animals, we shall partake of their nature” (II 61). As she puts it succinctly in another of her testimonies: “Concerning flesh meat, we should educate the people to let it alone. Its use is contrary to the best development of the physical, mental, and moral powers” (VII 124). In one of her letters, she advises that "[e]ggs should not be placed upon your table. They are an injury to your children. Fruits and grains, prepared in the most simple form, are the most healthful, and will impart the greatest amount of nourishment to the body, and, at the same time, not impair the intellect" (II 400).

White claims that “[f]lesh-meats constitute the principal article of food upon the tables of some families, until their blood is filled with cancerous and scrofulous humors” (III 563). In contrast, God has seen to it that “[w]e may enjoy the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, without doing violence to the laws of our being. These articles, prepared in the most simple and natural manner, will nourish the body, and preserve its natural vigor without the use of flesh-meats” (III 50). Given that “Satan is corrupting minds and destroying souls through his subtle temptations” White encourages readers to “discard tea, coffee, flesh-meats, and all stimulating food, and devote the means expended for these hurtful indulgences to spreading the truth” (III 569). Noting that “[s]ome, after adopting a vegetarian diet, return to the use of flesh meat,” she maintains that doing so “is foolish indeed and reveals a lack of knowledge of how to provide proper food in the place of meat” (VII 117).

White insists on the importance of education, which she believes needs to be based on “the practice of temperance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love to God and to one another. In order to attain this object, the physical, mental, moral, and religious education of children must have attention” (III 132). An education in line with the tenets of health reform is particularly important given that, in general,

[t]he moral powers are weakened, because men and women will not live in obedience to the laws of health, and make this great subject a personal duty. Parents bequeath to their offspring their own perverted habits, and loathsome diseases corrupt the blood and enervate the brain. The majority of men and women remain in ignorance of the laws of their being, and indulge appetite and passion at the expense of intellect and morals, and seem willing to remain in ignorance of the result of their violation of nature’s laws. They indulge the depraved appetite in the use of slow poisons, which corrupt the blood, and undermine the nervous forces, and in consequence bring upon themselves sickness and death (III 140-141).

Since White believes that “[a]nimals are becoming more and more diseased,” she is convinced that “it will not be long until animal food will be discarded by many besides Seventh-day Adventists” (VII 124).