W. A. Spicer was General Conference president from 1922 to 1930.  In 1898 he went toIndia and the next year became editor of the newly founded Oriental Watchman. He also became leader of Seventh-day Adventist work in India. He was the only ordained SDA minister in Southern Asia at that time. In 1901 he was appointed secretary to the Mission Board at Battle Creek, Michigan, becoming in 1903 secretary of the General Conference.

In this manuscript, written in 1938 but published here in its entirety for the first time, he gives as his reason for writing: "Down to the present there has been no time of greater crises in our work than the time of the pantheism crisis at the turn of the century. For the sake of those who were not observers of those things, it seems as though some of the record should be set down as a memorial to the Lord's guidance." We trust that this will shed some light, not only on the way the Lord led our church through these crisis years and away from the philosophies that would have changed the character of the SDA church from that of a Christian denomination to a theosophical cult, but also on the role that Ellen White played and the manner in which she played it. Of special interest is the way she tried to prepare the minds of the ministers to understand and withstand it by sending them to specific Bible passages yet not precisely defining what it was that they would be finding there.