What caused those post-Millerite Adventists to accept the visions of this young prophet hardly into her twenties?
First, there was the content of the visions. They were relevant and helpful in solving the immediate problems with which the conferences were dealing. Second, there was the awesome physical phenomena accompanying an open vision. This was never a test of authenticity, because Satan can and does counterfeit physical phenomena, but it surely was an evidence of supernatural activity. Third, there was the continuing phenomena of the prophet’s mind being “locked” when she was not in vision. This apparently lasted for a period of “two to three years”–concurrent with the Sabbath conferences–and during this time when not in vision, all Mrs. White could do was to report what she had seen in vision; she could not enter into the subsequent discussions of either the meaning of what she had seen or of Bible truth generally. “My mind was locked, as it were,” she wrote years later, “and I could not comprehend the meaning of the scriptures we were studying.” And it remained thus “locked” until all of
