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A Confused Leader
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August 25 - A Confused Leader

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For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing will be there. James 3:16, NKJV.

Talk about confusion.

That very word describes the mind of General Conference president George I. Butler on the eve of the 1888 General Conference session. Influenced by thoughts of the "California conspiracy," he fired off a 42-page typewritten letter of Ellen White on October 1, just a few days before the meetings, that at the very best reveals an utterly confused mental state.

After stating that he was suffering from "nervous exhaustion" and that because of his "nerve force having given out" he "should drop out of all positions of responsibility in the cause," he laid into Ellen White, telling her that she was the cause of his "present condition more than any one thing."

Butler was especially incensed about her seeming reversal on the nature of the law in Galatians. He was, to saythe least, obsessed with the topic.

"The opening up of this question as it has been on the Pacific Coast during the last four years," he wrote, "is fraught with evil and only evil. I firmly belive it will be found to be the cause of unsettling of the minds of many of our people, and breaking down their faith in the work as a unity, and that souls will be lost and give up the truth because of this, and that it will open a wide door for other innovations to come in and break down our old positions of faith.

"And they way it has been managed will tend to break the confidence of our people in the testimonies themselves. And this whole matter I believe will do more to break down confidence in your work than any thing which has occurred since this cause has had an existence.  . .It will break the faith of many of our leading workers in the testimonies."

He went on to blame W. C. White for a great deal of the problem and claimed that Jones and Waggoner needed to be "publicly rebuked."

Butler believed that he had been "slaughtered in the house of his friends." Broken in mind and health, he would not attend the 1888 session.

And all over an issue that Ellen White told him wasn't important.

Such are the facts of history.

We may be shcoked at Butler. But how many of us have stewed upon the theological edges of the Bible till we find ourselves in a similar state of spiritual and mental ill health. May we have God's grace not to major in minors but to focus on the great central thems of Scripture.

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He who causes the seed to spring up, who tends it day and night, who gives it power to develop, is the Author of our being, the King of heaven, and He exercises still greater care and interest in behalf of His children. While the human sower is planting the seed to sustain our earthly life, the Divine Sower will plant in the soul the seed that will bring forth fruit unto life everlasting(COL 89).
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