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Life Sketches of Ellen G. White
advance step on the part of her brethren in Australia, Mrs. White
wrote: “We all feel that the work is urgent. There is no part that can
wait. All must advance without delay.”
At times through the years of toil spent in raising up a strong
constituency in Australasia, and in establishing centers where the
youth might be trained as workers for God, Mrs. White and her
associates caught glimpses of what the future had in store for that
portion of the broad harvest field. The pioneers in that field,—Elders
Haskell, Corliss, Israel, Daniells, and others,—had early recognized
the possibility of raising up workers there who should be able to enter
the surrounding islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. But
late in the nineties, when the various branches of the cause of present
truth,—publishing, educational, and medical,—were becoming well
established, and many youth were being raised up as workers, the
brethren in charge of the Australasian Union Conference saw more
and still more clearly the opportunities for service with which they
were surrounded.
[372]
These possibilities of the future were outlined at length by Mrs.
White in communications addressed to the leaders of the cause of
God who were assembling in General Conference early in 1899. “Our
brethren have not discerned that in helping us,” she wrote to them
concerning the value of maintaining strong training centers for workers
in Australasia, “they would be helping themselves. That which is given
to start the work here, will result in strengthening the work in other
places. As your gifts free us from continual embarrassment, our labors
can be extended; there will be an ingathering of souls, churches will be
established, and there will be increasing financial strength. We shall
have a sufficiency not only to carry on the work here, but to impart
to other fields. Nothing is gained by withholding the very means that
would enable us to work to advantage, extending the knowledge of
God and the triumphs of truth in regions beyond.”
General Conference
Daily Bulletin, 1899, p. 131.
A Training Ground for Mission Fields
In behalf of the brethren and sisters in Australasia who were eager
to share the burdens of missionary endeavor in the regions beyond,
Elder A. G. Daniells, at that time the president of the Australasian