Success Quote by John Harvey Kellogg

The line reads like a man trying to cauterize a wound before it infects the whole body: short on theology, long on damage control. Kellogg doesn’t argue doctrine here; he performs innocence. The repetition - "charges... made against me... has made... has charged against me" - is not elegant, but it’s revealing. He’s stacking phrases the way a defendant stacks alibis, trying to overwhelm the listener with sheer insistence. The key move is the pivot from an abstract accusation ("denied the atonement") to a concrete setting ("in conversation with him"). Kellogg knows the real threat isn’t an academic disagreement; it’s the weaponized intimacy of a private exchange turned public, the kind of testimony that can’t be footnoted away.

Context sharpens the stakes. In Kellogg’s world - Seventh-day Adventism’s early, quarrelsome decades - the atonement wasn’t a side issue; it was a boundary marker for who counted as faithful. Kellogg, a famous health reformer and institution builder with real money and real influence, had also drifted into religious ideas (including charges of pantheism) that made church leaders nervous. Prescott, an Adventist educator and theologian, represents the gatekeeping class. Kellogg represents the charismatic operator whose success invites scrutiny.

So the intent is surgical: sever the accusation from his identity with the strongest available phrase, "absolutely false". The subtext is even louder: I’m being tried in the court of orthodoxy, and I know exactly how reputations are excommunicated - by turning a conversation into a creed.