A Study of Sadler "the Editor"
by Dave Holt
William S. Sadler: Psychologist, Surgeon, Medical Doctor, famous Chattaqua lecturer, author, detective, preacher, health food salesman. I wanted to get to know this man better, this man about whom so much has been said, about whom so many accusations of wrongdoing have been made. On trial, yet with little real examination. I immersed myself in his life for a while because his role is central to the rise of doubt and unbelief among some in our movement.
Born in 1875, Sadler was home-schooled by his parents until he left his home in Wabash, Indiana in 1889 at the age of 14. He moved to Battle Creek, Michigan where he worked at the well-known Battle Creek Sanitarium and met the Kellogg family who would become life-long associates, a second family to him. He also became baptized into the Kellogg's church, the Seventh Day Adventist Church (I'll refer to it as SDA from here on). A few years later (in 1893) when William Kellogg began manufacturing his soon to be very successful line of health foods, Sadler became a salesman for the new products. Then in 1897, Sadler married Lena Kellogg, William's daughter, also the niece of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the famous founder of the Battle Creek sanitarium.
Eventually, he became ordained as an SDA minister in 1901. He and Lena spent some years in San Francisco while he attended the SDA seminary here in the Bay Area, but they returned to Chicago just two years before the 1906 earthquake. Like many SDA church leaders at the time, he was disturbed by the controversy that swirled around Ellen White's plagiarisms, already discovered in her writings, and he eventually left the church in 1910. Or perhaps he was driven out. This was the end of a membership in the church that had lasted 21 years. Think about that for a minute. Meredith Sprunger tells us that Sadler, "rarely revealed this fact," of his SDA affiliation, "to his associates." There is an SDA website that has a long letter of Sadler's to Mrs. White, written in 1906, (which is also reprinted in Martin Gardner's book, Urantia) It details his objections and asks for her response, written in a tone that is still reverential but with respectful challenge. The letter also reveals a man poised at the precipice of a major decision. "I cannot afford to be wrong, whichever way it is. I must be right and I expect the Lord to help me into the light on all these matters…"
Martin Gardner has made much of the Seventh Day Adventist connection. His conjecture is that Sadler followed Mrs. White's example to create the Urantia Book: "This painful loss of a childhood faith left a huge void in the hearts of Sadler and Lena…[who] sought desperately for a replacement of Mrs. White who would not disappoint [them]…The forward-looking personality who put the papers into English was none other than Sadler himself." (Gardner's Urantia, p. 272-274)
It's hard to find instances in Sadler's behavior that support Gardner's characterizations of their "painful" and "desperate" reactions to the SDA disappointment. Both he and Lena's life stories are those of people who never succumbed to defeat, who didn't let on they'd been beaten, but found ways to keep on going, taking on new projects, finding new ways to serve humanity. These two had shed their past and were moving forward.
Everyone who met William Sadler was impressed by his gigantic intellectual abilities, his memory, his sheer command of information such as the medical history of his patients. He also dictated his books; "words just flowed before his eyes as though on a movie screen." (Sprunger) He apparently would have been quite capable of putting together a 2,096 page revelation. And he'd had a close associate, a predecessor in Mrs. White, whose successes and mistakes he was able to study up close. There is no doubt that SDA and Ellen White is an interesting coincidence, or at least, an intriguing confluence of influences and events in Sadler's life. But how do we interpret this connection?
What would motivate Sadler to put forward a revelation of his own creation? Prestige? Power? Personal fame? Being a Savior of the World? Episodes in his life repeatedly show that he didn't desire these things. As far as saving the world, yes I imagine he might have wanted that at moments (just as we do sometimes). But not to be the one getting the glory for such an achievement. The causes and the organizations that he devoted himself to demonstrate his service motivation: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Chicago Society for Personality Study, the College of Surgeons, just to mention a few. He founded a clinic that demanded no tuition fees from the students. He turned down an offer from the Guggenheim family to build a sanitarium and hotel with 51% of the stock to go to him as a reward. A wealthy fundraiser who came forward to pay for the UB's publication was rebuffed in favor of Lena's continuing fundraising efforts from within the ranks of those supporters of the book with less glittering reputations and pocketbooks . He regularly transferred his leadership duties to younger ones coming up behind him rather than holding on to his own position as founding father.
Sadler's early eagerness to follow Ellen White might be interpreted as a demonstration of his openness to the consideration of modern prophetic utterances that came from outside of traditional sources. His was the type of scientific mind that one of my heroes, Carl Sagan, admired: a person with no prejudice as to where the next insights would come from. Sadler had an adventurous mind much like a scientist's. He could look for spiritual truth beyond what was conventionally accepted and regarded by others as holy scripture.
He entered the field of psychiatry in 1911, leaving medicine temporarily to go study with Freud in Europe. He later established "a pastoral psychiatry clinic," to help clergy people understand and treat psychological problems. This open-mindedness, coupled with his investigative abilities, as shown by his detective work in Chicago, and later by the investigations into frauds and mediums that he conducted with the magician Howard Thurston, would have demonstrated to the authors of the UB that here was someone able to handle the bestowal of the new revelation already in its planning stages.
As Matthew Block's research has shown, the purported plagiarisms of the UB are nothing like Ellen White's word-for-word borrowings. Indeed, the human sources quoted and paraphrased in the UB cannot be compared to any "plagiarisms" we have ever seen before. I encourage you, if you haven't done so, to investigate Matthew's work as it continues to appear on the Square Circles website. You will better understand the difference in these "plagiarisms." Where Sister White's verbatim pillagings were easily discovered by her close followers, the Urantia Book's authors use of the "thousand human concepts" are not easily exposed in the expanded and enhanced form they've been given, often with the addition of a higher, cosmic perspective. Without Block's detective work, we might not have even recognized these passages as originating in a human source or "thought pattern."
The SDA controversy could also be interpreted as a motivating factor behind Sadler's later mindset, which was one of determination to expose deceptive psychic phenomena. He had learned from personal experience. Those of us with a background at Family Of God Foundation can understand this kind of motivation. But soon afterwards, he came across the "one exception to the general statement that all cases of psychic phenomenon" are "auto-psychism." (The Mind at Mischief, appendix)
Living inside Sadler's life as I have done recently is very much like inhabiting a new quantum universe where we deal with probabilities alone; not exact realities. Just as we cannot determine the exact location of a nuclear particle, given the quantum uncertainties, so are we unable to be accurate and precise concerning Dr. Sadler's motivations and actions. The at-the-scene witnesses are mostly dead and gone.
A man who I have known and admired over the years, Meredith Sprunger, is one of the last living individuals to have personally known Sadler well. Meredith called him, "probably the greatest man I have ever known." (at the memorial service, 1969) Yet I do not find those who have attacked Sadler, such as Gardner, and Harold Sherman, to be admirable or sincere in their motivations. Nevertheless, I still accept that William S. Sadler may have made some alterations in, or additions to the book that we call the Fifth Epochal Revelation.
The UB tells us that the ebbs and flows of spiritual presence are completely under the direction of our free will, subject to our choices and our sincere desires for more of the Deities' fellowship. Likewise is the withdrawal of deity presence subject to our will when we no longer choose to have it near. Our decisions and choices take precedence over the desires of our spiritual overseers for our welfare. "And thus does the spirit of divinity become humbly obedient to the choosing of the creatures of the realms." (p. 150; 13.4.5) The UB so consistently elevates and dignifies the preeminence of our free will, that it even goes so far as to make itself as a book secondary to our own personal religious experience. We are in a sense always limiting or qualifying the revelation of the Urantia Book, submitting it to the scrutiny of our "evaluator within, [without which] we could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings." (196: 3. p. 2094) The UB talks about how the teachings and revelations that proliferate on our planet must be "sort[ed] and censor[ed]". (p. 1007; 92.4) The fact that we have come to know more concrete details about how the UB was derived doesn't change the process of sorting and censoring which we, as thoughtful spiritual seekers, have always done before, and will continue to do in the future. Contrary to what you may have heard, I have only occasionally found, over my life-experience with the UB, students who show an unquestioning acceptance of the statements in the book.
What concerns me more is the ennui, apathy, and weariness we suffer in the Urantia movement right now. We are allowing ourselves to be tricked out of the will and desire to live passionately in the presence of God. We have watched the copyright court case, the battles over affiliation between Urantia Foundation and Fifth Epochal Fellowship, and many other legal and personal conflicts. We have grown disappointed and disillusioned by the questionable ways in which the Lord's servants have worked on his behalf. We allow the behavior of these men and women to reflect badly on the truth, even upon God. We know we should not tarnish God or the truth with the same brush used to portray the deeds of his followers, yet we so often do so.
Just at the point where it seems most important for us to be engaged, the free will choices we make seem to lead us into throwing ourselves with more determination into our jobs, our commutes, and the resolution of our money hassles, less engaged with our spiritual development. As the UB writes concerning Urantia after Pentecost, "One of the great troubles with modern life is that man thinks he is too busy to find time for spiritual meditation and religious devotion." (195: 6; 7, p. 2077)
I feel like I am watching an ancient Biblical proverb come true in our time, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Yet I open up the Urantia Book and find an antidote in many of its papers. Here is the vision we lack! I find it in the religion papers, the psychology that is depicted in the Adjuster papers, and of course the expanded life of Jesus.
I also see the current rise of fundamentalism within the religions of the world that seeks to re-impose the power trips of the ancient creeds, the sacred scriptures, and the old religious authorities-all of which trample underfoot the very personal spiritual liberties the UB wishes us to uphold and enhance.
I have fond memories of those times when we as a movement enthusiastically gathered together for projects and activities. Now, we are perhaps tempted to retreat. To feel that we can only go apart into our rooms, to close the door and pray, just as monks leave the world when the dark ages seem to descend upon them. Through meditation, contemplation and prayer we hope that we can raise the planet up spiritually from out of the darkness that descends upon it. And perhaps there is some validity to this point of view. But I think we will find in our study today that this is not the path that the Urantia Book is calling us to in our troubled times. The question we all have to answer is, do we, in our sorting and censoring process, want to throw out the visionary truths along with those other parts of the book that we find questionable. It is a decision we will make in partnership with our divine indwelling evaluator.