26
The Publishing Ministry
floor, well lighted and well furnished. Mrs. White looked searchingly
at all features of the place, and then said: “It is a good meeting-hall. I
feel that I have seen this place before.”
Not long after this, those parts of the building occupied by the
printing business were visited. When the pressroom was reached, the
press was running, and Mrs. White said, “I have seen this press before.
This room looks very familiar to me.” Soon the two young men who
were working in the pressroom came forward, and were introduced to
the visitors. Mrs. White shook hands with them, and then inquired,
“Where is the other one?”
“What other one?” Elder Whitney asked.
“There is an older man here,” Mrs. White replied, “and I have a
message for him.”
Elder Whitney explained that the foreman of the pressroom was in
the city on business.
It had been a little more than ten years since Mrs. White, in relating
before a large audience in the Battle Creek church what had been
shown her in vision regarding the work to be done in many foreign
lands, had said that she had seen printing presses running in many
foreign countries, printing periodicals and tracts and books on present
truth for the people of these countries. At this point in her narrative,
Elder James White had interrupted her, asking if she could name some
of these countries. She said she could not, because they had not been
named to her, “except one; I remember the angel said Australia.” But
she stated that although she could not name the countries, she would
[35]
recognize the places should she ever see them, because the picture was
very distinct in her mind.
In the pressroom of the new publishing house at Basel she recog-
nized one of these places. A few months after this, during her visit to
Norway, she recognized in the pressroom of the Christiania publishing
house another of these places; and six years later, during her visit to
Australia, she saw, in the Bible Echo Office in Melbourne, still another
pressroom where she recognized the place and the presses as among
those she had seen in the vision at Battle Creek, January 3, 1875. [
A
few months after Ellen White had this vision, her husband wrote, “It
is a pleasure here to state relative to the gracious manifestation of the
Holy Spirit to Mrs. White on the eve of January 3, 1875, that she had
been sick with severe influenza, and confined to her room and bed