I am currently reading Clara Endicott Sears’ page-turner Days of Delusion, which describes the furor in the early nineteenth century when William Miller predicted Jesus would return between 1843 and 1844*. He based his prediction on an interpretation of the Bible that was idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, I was surprised to learn that certain extraordinary events seemed to confirm it, gaining him an influx of adherents.
For example, after years of self-doubt about whether to make his views public, he experienced something strange in 1831; while thinking about his theory one morning, he felt he received a sudden, forceful call: “Go tell it to the world!” He then made a promise to God that, “if I should have an invitation to speak publicly in any place, I will go tell them what I find in the Bible about the Lord’s coming.” Lo and behold, just thirty minutes later, a man unexpectedly arrived at his house asking him to fill a preacher vacancy despite him not being a preacher. Coincidence?
Or consider the astonishing phenomenon that occurred only two years later; in the early-morning darkness of November 13, 1833, across the United States, so many thousands of meteors lit up the sky that it seemed the firmament was falling. One witness even reported the light to be so bright that he initially believed there to be a fire on his property, and, upon going to his window, he saw stars “descending in torrents as rapid and numerous as ever I saw flakes of snow or drops of rain in the midst of a storm.” Suddenly, Miller’s warnings of impending apocalypse no longer seemed so outlandish. Sears chronicles the phenomenon’s effect on the prophet’s movement:
Throughout the districts where William Miller had been sounding the alarm of approaching doom, the excitement was intense, and wherever his word had spread, this awe-inspiring spectacle produced a profound sensation, and brought many heretofore scoffers to join those who believed in his prophecy.
Moreover, in the very year of the anticipated catastrophe, 1843, a marvelous comet appeared. Sears quotes one account reporting that it had “been observed in the daytime even before it was visible at night—passing very near the sun, exhibiting an enormous length of tail,” and that Miller’s followers regarded it as proof they would soon witness “the speedy destruction of the world.”
What are we to make of the convergence of such extraordinary signs? Does it prove Miller to be a real prophet? Clearly not: the world did not end in 1843, as you might have noticed. Yet one can understand how such coincidences might have lent plausibility to Miller’s warnings at the time. And if, like me, you are a person who has interpreted certain coincidences in your life as signs of divine guidance, his story might give you pause. What if you are misinterpreting them as he did?
One section of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s masterpiece Enthusiasm explains how similar misinterpretation may account for the “inner light” of Quakerism. When we have “the experience of being determined for or against a course of action by a kind of impulse which we can only describe negatively, by saying that it did not proceed from any conscious calculation on our part,” we might assume it to be inspiration from the Holy Spirit, especially when the “promptings have led to good results.” This calls to mind Miller’s apparent prompting from God and its quick fulfillment that morning in 1831.
So, how can we discern which inner convictions come from heaven and which from only ourselves? We need external verification; we need God to speak to us from the outside, not just within. Otherwise, we are prone to get lost in our own heads, lacking an objective standard by which to differentiate between divine inspiration and mere stream of consciousness—we kneel to the stream and drown.
Of course, that is precisely why Miller found consolation in his apparent signs; they seemed to be external proof he was on the right track. But the problem was that they were open to conflicting interpretations. Was the “falling sky” a sign of the apocalypse, a mere call to repentance, or just a coincidence? It could not interpret itself.
What is needed, therefore, is divine intervention in which God externally, explicitly states his intended meaning—or in which he sends an emissary from heaven to do so. And his most exalted emissary is the one he created to be his own mother: Mary. Indeed, the Blessed Mother has intervened multiple times in history to draw people toward the truth. In a recent article for The Catholic World Report, Casey Chalk, a former Protestant, explains the significance of Marian interventions for people discerning which Christian denomination is most true. He writes:
An epochal shift in salvation history—say, the people of God being led into the Promised Land, or the coming of the Messiah—is attested to by miracles, such as those which accompanied Moses or Christ. However, neither Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, or Cranmer performed any such miracles to demonstrate divine approbation for the Reformation.
In sharp, glaring contrast, widely recognized miracles continue to confirm the Catholic Church is precisely who she says she is. I’ve had the great privilege to visit where one of those miracles took place: Tepeyac, Mexico City, where Mary appeared to an Aztec peasant almost five-hundred years ago.
Almost five-hundred years ago: precisely during the Reformation, when Protestantism could not claim similar signs. Based on the external evidence validating the Blessed Mother’s appearance in Mexico, we can therefore interpret the apparition to be objective confirmation of God’s stance in the theological debates of the time. Without such divine confirmation, we would have to rely solely on human argumentation, getting lost in the labyrinth of points and counterpoints between the brilliant controversialists of both sides.
Because the Catholic Church has thus been divinely validated, its visible institution—so often derided by the “spiritual but not religious”—stands as the external standard against which we should measure our internal promptings. When we suspect a personal urge or a cosmic coincidence might come from God, we should first confirm it aligns with Catholic doctrine and reject it if it does not. That is why Knox mentions Catholic followers of the “inner light” consulting their spiritual directors (priests giving them one-on-one guidance in aligning their lives with Christ), who will often meet them “(at least at first) with veiled incredulity and gentle dissuasion” to root out any merely human promptings.
Knox’s concern is to avoid the “enthusiasm” that is the title of his book, which he defines as “a kind of ultra-supernaturalism.” Just as, in the words of Knox, “the Lollard will decry human reason so as to leave more room for the inner light, just as the Anabaptist will protest against human institutions so as to pave the way for a theocracy,” and just as “the Quietist wants to do away with human effort as such so as to give God the whole right of spiritual initiative,” so William Miller’s biblical hermeneutic, in the words of Sears, “refused to be guided by the great weight of opinion that has accumulated through the centuries, nor would he accept the interpretations given by a long line of enlightened minds to some of the obscurer passages.” Driven presumably by the belief among certain (though not all) Protestants that interpretation of Scripture could be sufficiently guided by the Holy Spirit apart from tradition, “[h]e decided to be his own interpreter.”
And therein lies the irony: by trying to be directed by God separate from the tradition of the human institution of the Church, he fell into human error regarding his prophecy. For God has united himself with humanity through the Incarnation, causing the Church to be his very Body. To the extent that we distance ourselves from the Church’s visible institution, we thus distance ourselves from God and retreat into our own heads. And the result for William Miller was the apocalypse not of the world, but of his own movement.
_____________________________________
* This book first drew my interest when I heard of its passage recounting a memorable incident involving Miller’s followers, the Millerites, in my hometown of Westford, Massachusetts:
The principal meeting-place of the Millerites there was in a fine old mansion facing the green on the site of which now stands the Fletcher Memorial Library. It was owned by a man named Bancroft…. [M]any of them had white robes ready, and each one prayed loud, and sang loud, and shouted loud; and on this last night [before the supposed Second Coming] the unbelievers who were not up to see what was going to happen, lay awake listening to the tumult of sound that issued forth from the Bancroft mansion.
Now there was a man who lived near by who was generally known by the name of “Crazy Amos”…. He was the possessor of a very large horn, and it so happened that…he hurriedly dressed himself, and seizing his horn he rushed out upon the village green and blew a terrific blast upon it. The [Millerites], now congregated in the Bancroft house to await the awful summons of the Holy Angel Gabriel, heard the sound and for a moment a death-like stillness came over the assembly; then, uttering a great shout of exaltation, they rushed tumultuously in a body out of the house and on to the green, hustling and jostling each other in a frantic attempt to secure an advantageous position from which they might easily be “caught up into the air.”
A Walled but Windy Room 
One thought on “Bad news: the world ended in 1843”