A Perceptive Woman

White was a patriotic American, born in 1827 in one of the New England states, Maine, where most of the population was devoutly Protestant. She, herself, was raised in the home of a Methodist lay-preacher. Since our maternal ancestors were Methodists, we share an understanding of her spiritual background. Despite her loyalty to her nation this woman correctly identified the second beast of Revelation 13 as her homeland, the United States. It was a painful realization and went contrary to her patriotic instincts.

Further, as she recognized that the prophecy was plainly indicating that the Papacy and the United States would unite in the last day persecution of Christ’s flock, this concept ran totally contrary to the evidence of her day. While her Methodist background caused her no surprise in the specified prophesied deeds of Rome, the complicity of the United States was entirely a different matter. It tested her fidelity to Scripture, a test she withstood.

There were numbers of reasons in 1884 for rejecting outright the declarations of the prophecy. We shall examine these.

First, the United States was the bulwark of religious liberty. Her nation in adding the First Amendment to its Constitution had guaranteed not only religious liberty, but the separation of church and state. It was an example to the nations of the world. Our own nation, Australia, in 1901 when the states federated, adopted the very concepts of the United States’ First Amendment as Article 116 of its constitution. This Article had incorporated both the non-establishment clause and the free exercise clause from the First Amendment of the United States’ Bill of Rights.

Richard Ely, Professor of History at the University of Tasmania, himself a Presbyterian minister, recorded in his book "Unto God and Caesar," pages 26, 42, 78, 122, 136, Ellen Harmon White’s efforts to promote the adoption of Article 116 in the Australian Constitution of 1901. Mrs. Harmon White resided in Australia from 1891 to 1900. Our grandmother once met her just prior to her departure for the United States. Roger Williams was the founder of the state of Rhode Island, which was the first state in history to specifically guarantee religious liberty in its constitution. Roger Williams had written in The Bloody Tenet of Persecution,

In 1884, despite the apparent groundswell of support to impose Sunday laws by enactment of the United States Senate, the efforts of the leader of this movement, Senator Blair of New Hampshire, proved fruitless. Americans still valued their stand on religious freedom. Yet Ellen Harmon White wrote,

Only a person absolutely true to Scripture could have written such a prediction concerning the United States almost 120 years ago. Without divine prophecy the claim would have been absurd.

Here we see foretold a fourfold union, consisting of the three actors above—Apostate Protestantism, Spiritualism and Roman Catholicism—together with the political power of the United States.

We have already documented the "Holy Alliance" between the United States and the Vatican (see chapter "The Final Unholy Alliance") and between Evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics (see chapter "The Religious Right"). The Bakersfield Californian, July 2, 1994, published a full color cartoon of Uncle Sam stretching his hand across the "gulf" of the Atlantic Ocean to the Pope. It was an uncanny depiction of that which White had written precisely 110 years earlier, seventeen years after the United States had broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican in response to Pius IX’s issuing his offending Syllabus of Errors.

In his book, The Ambassador’s Story, published in 1994, Thomas P. Melady, the second United States Ambassador to the Vatican, 1989—1993, wrote that the long period of the breach in diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican, 1867—1984, a period of 117 years coincided with "a period of strong anti-Catholicism in the United States." President Ronald Reagan had resumed diplomatic relations with the appointment of William Wilson to the post in 1984.

In 1951 President Harry Truman failed in his effort to have the United States Senate affirm his appointment of General Mark Clark as Ambassador to the Vatican. The thirty-three years between Truman’s abortive effort and Reagan’s success included the pontificate of John XXIII. In the chapter entitled "John XXIII" it will be seen that John successfully allayed Protestant fears concerning the Papacy.

Melady, a Roman Catholic as was also William Wilson, stated in his book that,

It is not without significance that this review of Melady’s book was written by Rabbi Rudin, National Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee. He noted the part played by Melady in the creation of diplomatic ties between Israel and the Vatican. After all, didn’t Scripture foretell that all the world would wonder after the beast? (Revelation 13:3, emphasis added).

In 1888 Ellen Harmon White authored a book which she entitled The Great Controversy. There, quoting Revelation 13:3, she stated,

It was a brave declaration, one indicative of the author’s profound trust in the divine inspiration of Scripture, when it is considered that Protestant America seethed with anti-Catholic sentiment at the time she penned her conclusion.

In 1846, when Ellen Harmon White was nineteen years old, Samuel J. Cassels, a Presbyterian minister of Norfolk, Virginia, published a book entitled Christ and Antichrist. The alternative name printed in the title page of the book was Jesus of Nazareth Proved to be the Messiah and the Papacy Proved to be the Antichrist Predicted in the Holy Scriptures. This book was published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, Philadelphia. Leading clerics of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Episcopalian churches gave the book their endorsement. This Protestant view of the Papacy extended throughout mainstream American Protestantism until the end of the nineteenth century and persisted to a considerable extent to the end of the twentieth century. While American anti-Catholic sentiment prevailed, the future alliance of the United States and the Vatican was a chimera. Yet White was not turned from Biblical pronouncements by this situation.

Second, in her 1884 book on this subject written only fourteen years after Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of Papal Infallibility, Ellen Harmon White referred to the long tradition of this claim and wrote concerning future Protestant complacency, not as if writing in the nineteenth century, but rather in our century, the twenty-first. The ecumenical movement has led to Protestants becoming lulled into a sense of amnesia. They have, in general, lost all memory of Papal history. Even when John Paul II in 1998 threatened "whoever,"—not just the Roman Catholic faithful—whoever did not abide by Roman Catholic dogma would be "punished as a heretic," (Apostolic Letter, Ad tuendum fidem)—we Protestants slept on in a state of somnolence akin to a deep coma. Thus Ellen Harmon White’s words, so perceptive, rooted in her study of Revelation, are a wake-up call for us today. They, too, speak to the hearts of Roman Catholics and non-Christians. It is high time to heed the Apostle Paul’s admonition:

Read Ellen Harmon White’s perceptive words with care.

Ellen Harmon White’s words are amply fulfilled today. Roman Catholic historians are excusing the cruelties and injustice of the Papacy. The Brisbane Courier Mail of November 2, 1998, reporting on the views of Roman Catholic historians, stated,

What these scholars failed to declare was that the brutality of the times was the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church which so dominated Europe that it set the trends, the standards and the atmosphere of the society. Even worse, it was this church which sanctified such brutality as a service to God.

Ellen Harmon White perceptively pointed to the Dogma of Papal Infallibility, proclaimed only fourteen years prior to authoring her book. She set forth the chilling implications of this dogma, implications which Scriptural prophecy in Revelation chapter 13 declares will be fulfilled just prior to Christ’s Second Coming.

When those words were written it seemed quite impossible that the Papacy would ever again muster such worldwide power, unless—unless one believed the prophecy of Revelation. And this Ellen Harmon White manifestly did. That the United States would unite in persecution with the Papal power seemed impossible, but in the years following 1980 we have seen the growing Vatican-American alliance. Even today it is inconceivable in the minds of many that Rome would persecute again—but she will; and the United States will provide the power and authority for her to do so and aid her in this work. This Scripture declares.

Third, the United States in 1884 was a relatively weak nation as compared with the great European empires of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Austria. Its foreign policy was dominated by the Monroe Doctrine. On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe, America’s fifth president (after whom Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia was named the previous year) issued the doctrine which bears his name. It led to an isolationist mentality in the United States.

Monroe simply codified that which, twenty-seven years earlier, George Washington stated in his farewell address, September 19, 1796. Monroe stated that,

In fact in 1823 much of North America was as yet unoccupied by western settlers, and other areas were in dispute. Britain, France and Spain all had their eyes on America, and in the Northwest the Tsar of Russia, who had claimed what is now Alaska, was thirsting for more American territory.

In 1845, President James Polk invoked the Monroe Doctrine against Britain and France who were scheming to take the Yucatan province of Mexico. With the United States distracted by the Civil War of the 1860s, Spain seized the Dominican Republic and France set up a member of the Habsburg family, the Archduke Maximilian, as Emperor of Mexico.

By 1870, with Ulysses S. Grant as President, the Doctrine was immensely popular in the United States. The view that "Europe and the Americas constitute two separate and distinct spheres of political activity and, politically speaking, should have as little to do with each other as possible," (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963 edition, Vol. 15, p. 735) dominated American thinking. It was a thinking which foresaw no American influence outside the Western Hemisphere. The NATO of the twenty-first century then appeared light-years away.

But God had spoken and White believed. It was not until 1917, two years after Ellen Harmon White’s death, that the first breach in the Monroe Doctrine occurred. President Woodrow Wilson, the last of America’s eight presidents from Virginia, took the United States into the First World War as a belligerent.