The Salem Orientalist Society

A prosperous man in Poultney Vermont in the first decades of the 19th century, William Miller was justice of the peace as well as a captain in the Vermont militia. Like many of the men in his situation he thought of himself as a Deist and was an active Freemason. After a time of serious reflection on religious matters, he decided to go back to the church that he grew up in and became a Baptist, and by 1833, he had become a recognized Baptist minister. His Deist friends gave him a hard time about it and tried to get him to explain how the Bible could be literally true, full as it is of seeming contradictions. Miller gave some thought to this and decided that the problem wasn't with the Bible, but with people's insufficient studiousness in approaching it, and set out to parse it verse by verse, not moving past one sentence until he felt that he understood the meaning. As he completed this process, he made a discovery that made his initial intent to disprove the Deists seem insignificant. The Bible, Miller realized, was explicit about the time when Jesus would return to the Earth to rule and all people would be judged. Having determined that Biblical authors used the term "day" in a metaphorical sense to refer to a year, Miller concluded that Daniel's prophecy in 8:14 that "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed," meant that the world would end twenty three hundred years after the rebuilding of Jerusalem in 457 B.C. To his terrific astonishment, this meant that the Millennium would begin around 1843. Although he had convinced himself of this fact by 1818, his first public exposition of the principle did not come until several years later, after he had thoroughly rechecked his conclusion, and verified with numerous other Biblical passages that the projected date was correct.

By this point, Miller had come to realize that he had been given this enlightenment because he had a divine mission to fulfill in warning the people to repent before it was too late. And, people by the thousands were convinced by his message and felt the spirit testify that they could no longer delay the day of their repentance. After the publication of Evidence from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, about the Year 1843: Exhibited in a Course of Lectures in 1840, preachers across the nation took up Miller's message and converted myriad Millerites, who, though they typically stayed associated with the denominations from which they came, found a new fervor of faith in the preaching of the Midnight Cry.

As 1843 neared, many of Miller's followers asked if he could come up with an even more specific time, and he attempted to reconcile the differences in various calendars in order to oblige, suggesting that the time might be between the Vernal equinox in 1843 and that of 1844, but after that time had passed, he realized that a different Jewish calendar might put the date at as late as April 18th of 1844.

Some have suggested that by this time Miller felt as if he had been caught up in something that wasn't really what he had intended. Instead of a commitment to righteousness based on the understanding that the Saviour would soon return, dynamic and sometimes demagoguic associates, along with followers who were more interested in knowing what the rest of the world didn't than purifying their lives had made a kind of loosely organized religious sect. Finally appeasing the public hunger for absolutes, a preacher associated with Miller named Samuel S. Snow declared at a huge meeting that his careful study of the Bible proved that Jesus would return at midnight on the 22nd of October, 1844. The popular press found this tremendously good material, exaggerating accounts of people doing things like selling all their property or abandoning their fields, and public attention nationwide focused on the promised day.

When the morning of the 23rd of October arrived and Jesus apparently hadn't, a lot of people were very disappointed. Perhaps the worst of the aftermath was the ridicule to which William Miller was subjected, given his attempts to make it clear that a small human error in either the translation of the Bible or his or others' calculations might throw off his projections, and that he had always meant for the warning of the immanent end of the world as a general exhortation for increased righteousness, and not as the basis for impious spectacle. He died in 1849, unwavering in his faith that Jesus' return was imminent.

Other followers, especially those who had been much more adamant about the exact time of the second coming of Christ, found various ways of explaining the evident failure of their prophecies. A popular explanation was that the "cleansing of the sanctuary" mentioned by Daniel referred not to the millennial purification of the Earth by fire, but to the beginning of the final judgement. This meant that Jesus was evaluating the lives of all those who had ever lived in preparation for their salvation or destruction at his return, which might still happen at any time. James and Ellen White espoused this interpretation and founded the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Jonathan Cummings, another preacher associated with Miller, determined that his calculation had been off by ten years, and that Jesus would return in 1854. As one might imagine, the national phenomenon accompanying the first prediction was impossible to recreate, and after 1854 had passed, Cummings and several others adopted explanations similar to those of the Seventh Day Adventists, and founded their own Advent Christian Church.

All of these characters and movements have been the subject of extensive study, but Miller had another, little known follower by the name of William Matthew Prior who proposed another, far more radical explanation for the Great Disappointment in 1844. If the name seems familiar, it may be because many of you have read of Prior before in this same forum; he was the artist of the posthumous portrait of "Little Miss Fairfield." In addition to painting, he was also apparently something of a theologian. He wrote two books, The King's Vesture, in 1862, and The Empyrean Canopy, in 1868. The two books have essentially the same message, and whereas the first was published by a Boston firm, the second was a sort of self-publication, suggesting that Prior was having a hard time getting public acceptance for his ideas, and wanted to keep up interest in them even lacking an agreeable publisher.

Prior's method was not unlike Miller's in that he based his argument on highly specific interpretations of Biblical passages. His thesis, though, was completely unprecedented and seems incredible to read: "...the writer will avoid self-account, and bring Bible and comparative proof, of the cause, for or against the argument in crowning Mr. William Miller as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and as Michael, your Prince." I.E. William Miller was correct in predicting the second coming of Jesus Christ, because he himself was Jesus Christ.

We're left with vastly more questions than answers. Was Prior trying to start a new religion? If so, was his motive genuine faith in his conjecture, or something more worldly? What would he have done had anyone believed him? Are we meant to compare this with the Shaker doctrine of Christ's second appearing in the person of Mother Ann Lee? I wish very much that the writer had indulged in a little self-accounting.

Here's a picture of me and William Miller, taken by my good friend Carly and painted by my good friend Will: