If you google around on the web under "Millerite" or "William Miller" you
are likely to get something waffly like this:
Millerite. A follower of William Miller (1782 - 1849), who
taught that the coming of Christ was at hand.
Which is like
describing a
Catholic as:
Catholic: A follower of The Pope, who taught that there is a
god.
Actually Millerites were
far more interesting and
specific than that. Additionally, they were
provably wrong, which has the
novelty of being
unusual, as most religions seem to be far more
careful
about the
predictions they make or
prophecies they
publicly subscribe to.
In short, the Millerites believed not only that Christ's advent
was nigh (a belief shared by most evangelical Christian faiths), they also
believed that they knew when it would happen. Based on the Biblical prophecy
idea of a year for a day, and counting forward from a "known" date in Old
Testament book of Daniel, Miller had come to the conclusion that Christ would
make his triumphal return, in his words "in about 1843".
Like all faulty logic, if you accept the initial errors, it is easy to come
to the same erroneous conclusion. If you follow Miller's line of reasoning
†, and accept that the "sanctuary being cleansed" is a metaphor for
the second coming, then his selected date certainly appears to be
significant.
Naturally (from the POV of this writing!), on the first dates selected
(between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844), Jesus was a no-show. Miller,
and the Millerites lost an enormous amount of credibility. But they were not to be
put off by something as insignificant as being totally wrong! They went back
to their Bibles, and tried again. Lo and behold, and fortunately for the true
believers there had been a mathematical error! A new date was
found, and there is some controversy about if it was selected by Miller
himself or by an acolyte. Controversy notwithstanding, it was soon the
position of the entire Millerite movement that since Jesus was a Jew, he would
probably return at the end of the Jewish year on October 22, 1844.
Any account of that day will fail to capture the enormity of what occurred for several reasons:
because no-one thought to keep accurate numbers of the people who left their
crops in the fields, their shops unattended, and
congregated in groups all over New England and upstate New York
to wait for the Lord; the newspapers who reported on the event were full of ridicule; and those involved were often actively trying to forget. At the time, there were more than fifty thousand
people on the church roll of the Millerite movement, along with
200 preachers with the best fire and brimstone they could
muster. So imagine, if you will, those 50,000 believers begging, pleading,
coaxing and using threats to get their friends and loved ones to come
with them to "the last church meeting ever"! And then there would have been
those that went to point and laugh, those that went because they saw others
going, and those that saw a group standing and singing gospel
songs and decided to wander over.
Any way that you do those numbers, there must have been
between a quarter of a million and half a million people standing in
groups waiting to see a small black cloud the size of a man's hand. They stood
there all day. And nothing happened. It came to be known, with some
understatement, as "The Great Disappointment of 1844" and spawned at least one
religion from the ashes, the Seventh-Day Adventist church.
As for Miller and the Millerites, they carried on, greatly reduced in numbers
of course. Miller did lecture tours challenging
theologians to point out where, exactly, he had gone wrong. It wasn't hard, in the Millerite spirit of "the Bible explains itself" to find 1 Thessalonians 5:4,9-10 "For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night". The
movement did not survive Miller's death in 1849.
† How they got there: The German Lutheran theologian Johann
Albrecht Bengel (1687 - 1752), was the first to propose Heilsgeschichte -
the theology of salvation history. Bengel felt he could predict the date of
the end, which he said would occur about 1836. Bengel's work is held by many
to have influenced John Wesley. In the early eighteenth century it was
commonly believed by theologians that the 1260 days (years) of papal supremacy
ended in the 1790s (from Daniel 7). As soon as the 1790s rolled around,
there was a shift from Daniel 7 to Daniel 8 and the 2300 days mentioned in
that chapter.
Some of the more prominent names to lend their weight to the growing
apocalyptic fervour of the early 1800s included:
So Miller and the Millerites
were not alone, but were rather an
American version of the above gentlemen's
congregations, and they fed into and from the
zeitgeist. It has been reported
that Miller became very
wealthy from his speaking engagements, and from
offerings collected in Millerite churches, but this author
could not verify that claim.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/millerite
http://www.e-historicist.com/WmMiller/
http://www.presenttruthmag.com/7dayadventist/1844/index.html
http://www.adventist.org/heritageministry/miller.htm
http://www.planetbahai.org/articles/2000/ar010800a.html
http://www.chrisnelson.net/end2.htm
http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/tgd.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/amprophesy.html
http://www.goodnewsunlimited.org.au/miller.htm