Interesting further facts about

Ellen White and

Daniel March

 

[1]  Ellen White is known to have owned and used these books by Daniel March:
 

Walks and Homes of Jesus  (1866)

Our Father's House  (1870)

Night Scenes in the Bible  (1872)

Home Life in the Bible  (1873)
 

In addition to these, she may also (by the White Estate's own admission) have owned and used:
 

From Dark to Dawn  (1879)

Days of the Son of Man  (1885)

[2]  Sunday, December 8, 1878, Denison, Texas, Ellen White wrote as follows to Mary White:

Dear daughter [in-law] Mary: ... Be sure and send me that coarse material like Emma's dress.  Please send that double paisley shawl.  I have a plan for it.  Send my plaid shawl, and you may send two comfortables.  Send books, red-covered Jewish Antiquities and the Bible Dictionary.  Is Night Scenes of the Bible there?  If so, send it.                     -- Letter 60, 1878.

 

[3]  Arthur Maxwell, the SDA who wrote Uncle Arthur's Bed Time Stories and Story of the Bible, seems to have known more about Ellen White's copying than church members were let in on.  About the year 1919 he was in a bookstore with Henry Brown.  Brown described the incident as follows:

He was considerably older than I, and we were looking over some books in a second-hand bookstore.  He pulled down from the shelf a book entitled, Night Scenes in the Bible, by Daniel March.  He says, "This is a book from which Mrs. White secured many of her most beautiful pages."  I was amazed and stunned.

[4]  Fred Veltman, studying 15 chapters in Desire of Ages, found that Daniel March had been used 129 times.  If the average for the other chapters was the same as for these, then Daniel March was used in Desire of Ages 748 times.

[5]  March was used 748 times in just the one book.  How many times March was used in all the EGW writings is unknown, but the total must be enormous.

[6]  And how many times that all authors were used in all the EGW books must be mind-boggling.  In the 15 chapters studied by Veltman, Daniel March was used 129 times, and William Hannah was used 321 times.  This means that in just one book (Desire of Ages), Hannah was used an estimated 1,862 times, and Hannah + March were used over twenty-six hundred times.

 

Source of data on Veltman:  Ministry Magazine, Oct. 1990 -- The Desire of Ages Project by Fred Veltman.   Part 1of 2 .  Dec. 1990 -- Part 2 of 2, The Conclusions.

 

 

The reader may assess for himself the cumulative unlikelihood of the following:

 

That Daniel March, an uninspired writer, wrote so well that he tempted Ellen White, an inspired writer, to plagiarize him. That God, who knew the end from the beginning and could see the damage that the practice (once it was discovered) would inflict upon His messenger's credibility, yet allowed the practice. That God allowed it to go on.  And on.  And on.  And on . . .  (Ending only with EGW's death in 1915.) That God demanded perfect integrity of SDAs, yet allowed His top SDA to copy massively and to claim she never did.    Plagiarism was acknowledged in EGW's day, even by SDAs, to be dishonest.  To that dishonesty she added lying about having done it.  To those who claim that everyone in her day copied, and no one thought it wrong, we would merely ask:  If everyone thought copying was OK, then why would Ellen White repeatedly lie about having done it?  (The supposed explanation is contrary not just to fact but to logic as well.)   That God knew of her massive copying and of her denials, yet gave a vision which placed her among the 144,000 -- a group in whose mouth "was found no guile" (Rev. 14:5).

Here is another interesting chain to follow and to consider the cumulative unlikelihood of its links:

 

That Ellen White, during the window of time between receiving an idea from God and writing it, would happen to read (yes, dear reader) the very same idea. That the idea might not be just a phrase or single thought, but rather multiple sentences and multiple thoughts. That the idea could even run through whole paragraphs. That this happened not just once, or twice, but hundreds of times.