Radio Script #1198

Little Talks on Common Things
April 8, 1979

Occasionally on this program I have mentioned the excitement caused by the Millerites and their prediction of the end of the world 125 years ago. Led by a charismatic preacher, William Miller, a considerable number of people came to believe that the end was at hand. In various parts of the country, including Maine, the faithful gathered at appointed places to await the doom of the world. They were severely disappointed when the end did not come.

Half a century ago, Maine’s best known historian, John Francis Sprague decided to learn all he could about those followers of Apostle Miller in Maine. He learned some interesting facts. Most of the stories about the faithful donning white robes and mounting hilltops to await the end were not true. He found no evidence that the Millerites donned ascension robes. After publishing that denial, Sprague received a letter from Dr. Scott Hill of Augusta, who wrote: “At that time of Millerite prediction for the end in 1854, my boyhood home was a farm near Sabattus. I remember hearing father’s hired man tell my parents how a few people in the village prepared ascension robes and wore them on the appointed day.”

Sprague was still not impressed. He commented, “While there may have been rare cases when some silly and ignorant ones did this, yet we feel confident that, as a sect at least, the leaders neither advised nor sanctioned such a practice.”

There were, in fact, two distinct climaxes in the Millerite movement. After the end failed to come in 1843, the sect did not disintegrate, as might have been expected.The faithful decided that Miller had simply made a mistake in his calculations. A new date was set for the autumn of 1854, eleven years after the first expectation. John Francis Sprague was then six years old and he remembered the occasion well. By that time the followers of Miller had begun to call themselves Second Adventists, that is believers in the imminent second coming of Christ. Sprague’s father was himself a member of the sect, so he had good reason to remember what happened. Sprague wrote that the new campaign had begun with the establishment of an Adventist paper in Boston under the editorship of Elder Miles Grant. All the sect’s preachers were called Elders, soundly- denouncing the title of Reverend. In most respects, their theological views were similar to those of the larger and well established trinitarian denominations of Baptists, Methodists and Congregationalists. Like the Baptists, they practiced baptism by immersion, and they celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the same manner. Some, but not all of the
Millerites practiced foot-washing. Their distinction from other sects was their belief in the physical resurrection of the dead on the day of judgment and that the appointed day was near at hand.

Sprague recalled that, when the appointed day passed in 1854 without the the expectations being fulfilled, the leaders of the sect decided that the exact time of the world’s end was one of the mysteries of religion which man’s mind could not fathom by mathematical computation, as Miller had tried to do. The failure to predict a definite day did not, as has been alleged, weaken their faith. In fact their members increased and to this very day the Second Adventists are a substantial and vigorous denomination.

The Millerites believed in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures, from the first word in Genesis to the last word in Revelations. The Bible was to be taken literally; no part of it had any obscure or allegorical meaning. The Bible, just as it appeared in the King James version of 1611, must be their guide and their law. At the time of the solemn preparation that Sprague remembered when he was a child of six, the Millerites refused to take any part in the affairs of state. They could not be induced to vote, but they paid their taxes without protest, because the Bible commanded them to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Like the Quakers, the Millerites opposed both war and slavery, and in the Civil War they won government recognition as legitimate war-resistants.

Sprague insisted that the Millerites in Maine’s Piscataquis County were God-fearing, devout and peaceful people, neither
their neighbors, said Sprague, had great respect for the sincerity, dignity, and purity of their lives. Of course they met with violent opposition, especially when their plans to prepare for the end on a designated day had economic repercussions. Examining old letters, Sprague had come across an interesting episode of Millerite days that concerned a leading attorney of Piscataquis County, James Stuart Holmes. It seems that, when the first Millerite movement reached its height in 1843, one center of their activity was the little town of Atkinson. Their preaching, especially their setting a date for the end, was regarded as heresy by more orthodox citizens. A delegation from those opposing forces went to the county seat at Dover and instituted legal proceedings against certain Millerite preachers as vagrants. Because those preachers were indeed itinerants, the charge seemed to have some logical basis. Without any hope of compensation, Attorney Holmes offered himself as lawyer for the accused. For four days the courtroom was crowded with spectators, the majority of whom wanted to see the Millerite preachers put behind bars. Holmes made an eloquent argument for tolerance and religious freedom, including the right of every person to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. The court found the accused not guilty and promptly discharged them.

In one respect the Millerites did open themselves up to well founded criticism. That was their attitude toward education. Obviously a parent who believed that within a few years or even months the world would come to an end, could not take as much interest in his child’s schooling as could one who expected his children to grow to maturity. Naturally the hope of a Millerite parent centered in guiding the child for a seat with the saints, rather than having him learn about a world that was soon to be destroyed. Thus for sincere and devout, though misguided, reasons a number of Maine children were deprived of childhood schooling that was sorely missed in later years.

Another result of the delusion about a definitely predicted day was the impoverishment of Miller’s most devout followers. As Sprague told it, “For a year or more before the hoped for day, which never came, some of the families whom I know literally obeyed the command to sell their worldly goods and give all to the poor. Hence the passing of the expected day left them destitute.”

Sprague found that the Millerites had some common instances with the Spiritualists. This is what Sprague wrote about it:
“The Millerites believed in a personal devil as fully as they believed in a personal God. I think it was 1848, the year of my birth when the Fox sisters proclaimed to the world their prowess as mediums and their mysterious rattlings. The orthodox of nearly all religions denounced the Spiritualists, charging that their phenomena were all trickery and fraud. Not so the Millerites. They hailed the rattlings and the trances as clear signs that the evil days were near an end and the Second Coming just around the corner.”

Most Millerites accepted all Spiritualist claims as actual. facts. The Millerites had a quite different explanation of the phenomena. The mysterious signs did not emanate from departed spirits, because there weren’t any such beings. To the Millerites, the dead were in an unconscious state and would remain so until the judgement day of resurrection. So the Spiritualist manifestations could have only one cause. They had to be the work of the Devil.

In his investigation of the Millerites, Historian Sprague found a kindred soul in a man well known in Waterville, though when Sprague wrote his article the man was living in Augusta. He was Norman Bassett, a native of Windsor, a graduate and trustee of Colby, and a law partner of his famous uncle, Judge Leslie Cornish. Some years later Bassett was appointed a member of the Maine Supreme Court of which his uncle, Judge Cornish had been the illustrious chief justice.

It was Bassett who put Sprague in touch with Miss Clara Endicott Sears of Boston who had for many years been collecting information about the Millerites. As time went on Sprague convinced Miss Sears that the persistent stories about the Millerites donning ascension robes and waiting the end on rooftop and high up on lofty hill were without foundation. Of course John Francis Sprague’s most important contribution to that investigation was his definite proof that, illstead of dying out, the Millerites became the Second Adventists, whose only difference with their predecessors was their refusal to set a definite day for the end of the world.

We have just time for one more brief item of disillusionment. This concerns not the Millerites, but the institution of slavery. Students of Maine history, knowing that there were anti-slavery societies in the state as early as 1833, are prone to believe that Maine was a hot-bed of abolition. That the state produced the martyr Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who was killed by an Illinois mob in 1837 because he refused to stop publishing abolition articles, added to this conviction about Maine’s anti-slavery views.

It is interesting, disappointing as it may be to those who like to think of Maine as leading the anti-slavery movement, to note a set of resolutions passed by the Maine Legislature on March 22, 1836. Here is what they said: “Resolved, that the U. S,. is a government of enumerated, limited and defined powers, all of which are, set forth in the Constitution, and all powers not granted in that instrument are reserved to the states or to the people. Resolved further that the power of regulating slavery within the confines of a state was not granted to the federal government, and any action by one state with the domestic concerns of another state tends to disturb the harmony of the Union and should be opposed by every good citizen.

“Resolved further, that since in Maine the discussion of the abolition of slavery has been arrested by the decided expression of public misapprobation; we find legislation on the subject of slavery is inexpedient. The Governor of Maine is hereby instructed to send a copy of these resolutions to the executives of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama
and Virginia.”

Year: 1979