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The Great Disappointment of 1844  

100,000 faithful left in the lurch

October 22, 1844 was the predicted day that Jesus Christ would come again to make the Last Judgment, according to William Miller (right, 1782 - 1849), an American Baptist preacher, respectable farmer and keen amateur student of scripture, and founder of the Millerites and from it, Seventh Day Adventism.

Miller based his notion on the prophecy in Daniel 8:14: "Unto 2,300 days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed". The cleansing of the sanctuary, Miller believed, could only mean the purging of the earth by fire – that is, the end of the world.

After Miller shared his prophetic interpretations at a local church in 1831, his fame spread widely in a movement known as ‘the great second advent awakening’. In 1838 he published Evidence From Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, About the Year 1843. At first, Miller claimed to have inside knowledge that Jesus Christ's second advent on earth would occur between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.

A few days before the Great Disappointment, Miller had written in the Adventist journal, The Midnight Cry: 

If he does not come within 20 or 25 days, I shall feel twice the disappointment I did this spring. But, says my unbelieving neighbor, "If you will be disappointed again, we will not pity you, if you fail." Then so it must be. But one thing I do know, there is glory in my soul now; and I will not spoil that, by doubting, when I have no reason to doubt.

Many who believed him quit their jobs and sold all their possessions, while others hid away and spent their time preparing for Christ's coming. When Jesus and the End of the World failed to materialise, Miller said he’d made a mistake in calculating the Biblical prophecy and set a new date: October 22, 1844. On that day, as many as 100,000 followers gathered in makeshift temples and on hillsides to “meet the bridegroom”. When midnight came and Christ had not returned, people grew restless, and some walked out. Some even rationalised that allowance must be made for differences of longitude between Palestine and the USA. 

It is hard not to be moved as we read of one follower's profound disappointment:

Passing over the other like manifestations of the power of God, we glance at our disappointment at the tenth of the seventh month, 1844. Having the true cry, Behold the Bridegroom cometh, on the tenth day of the seventh month, and having been early taught by modern orthodoxy that the coming of the Bridegroom to the marriage would be fulfilled in the personal second advent of Christ to this earth, (which was a mistaken idea) we confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him; and that his voice would call up Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the ancient worthies, and dear friends which had been torn from us by death, and that our trials and sufferings, with our earthly pilgrimage would close, and we should be caught up to meet our coming Lord to be forever with him, to inhabit bright golden mansions in the golden home city prepared for the redeemed. Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled 12, at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn. I mused in my own heart, saying, My advent experience has been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experience. If this had proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experience worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God, no heaven, no golden home city, no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable? Is there no reality to our fondest hope and expectation of these things? And thus we had something to grieve and weep over, if all our fond hopes were lost. And as I said, we wept till the dawn.
Hiram Edson, 1844, on his disappointment

Of course, most of the thousands of Millerites left the movement. Some, however, went back to their Bibles to find what had gone wrong. Many concluded that the prophecy predicted not that Jesus would return to earth in 1844, but that he would begin at that time a special ministry in heaven for his followers. Out of this realisation grew the modern-day Seventh-Day Adventist Church, led by ‘prophetess’ Ellen G White, among others.

Miller acknowledged his mistake, writing in the December 7 edition of The Midnight Cry:

Then the brethren who loved the appearing of our Savior, found themselves among opposers. And instead of meeting sound argument and light among their former brethren, they were almost universally met with scoffing, ridicule, and misrepresentation. Odious names and cruel epithets were applied to us; and in many cases our motives were impugned, and a war of extermination was commenced against the Advent faith. Many of our brethren caught a measure of this spirit, and began to defend themselves in like manner, against the attacks of the several sects. The name of "Babylon," and I am sorry to say it, was applied to all of our churches without any discrimination, although in too many instances it was not unjustly applied.

When prophecy fails

Belief in predictions, anomalous events and pseudoscientific phenomena, such as the imminent end of the world, UFO attacks, angelic visitations, the belief that a full moon causes an increase in the crime rate, that constellations, planets or deities influence our fate, and so on, are common despite their repeated and celebrated failure throughout all history. However, often, a serious disconfirmation, such as when the UFOs fail to appear, leads not to the believer discarding the belief, but to believing it more strongly, and often increasing his or her spiritual devotion. Dr Robert Glick, head of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, calls belief systems “societal pain relievers”, and it might be that renewed and increased belief is like having an extra aspirin when the pain increases due to evidence of one’s foolishness.

It can be the case that contradictory evidence can even strengthen the original belief. Social psychologist Leon Festinger and colleagues pointed out in When Prophecy Fails, that holding two contradictory beliefs leads to ‘cognitive dissonance’, a state of mind that humans find uncomfortable. The devout might then selectively reinterpret data, reinforcing one of the beliefs regardless of the plausibility and obviousness of the contradictory case. Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult whose members were convinced the earth was going to blow up; when the date passed and the earth didn't explode, the cult said that the power of their prayers had prevented the disaster.

Dr Jeffrey Schaler, adjunct professor of psychology at American University, says, “When people can't reconcile scientific data with their own beliefs, they minimize one of them – science – and escape into mysticism, which is more reliable to them”. But why do people who have a serious disconfirmation of a crazy belief so often seem to become more, not less, devout and evangelistic in their faith when their belief is shown to be mumbo-jumbo? Some psychologists hypothesise that the basic psychological process involved in this paradox is that when one feels foolish, a possible solution is to proselytise and convert the whole world to one’s folly. The unconscious motivation: if everyone believes what I believe, no one will laugh at me any more.

Disappointment for the Southcottians  

Joanna Southcott

October 19, 1814 is the day that self-proclaimed English prophetess, Joanna Southcott (1750 - 1814), fixed as the date that she would give birth to a son (the Shiloh of Genesis xlix, 10) who would be a great spiritual leader, in fact, the new Messiah.

Southcott, originally an English Methodist, represented herself as a spiritual leader and prophetess, gathering a côterie of followers. She said she was the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation xii, 1). There was no religious leader more discussed in 19^th-century Britain than Southcott. Her political views appear to have been quite reactionary, and she opposed Tom Paine, penning a tract called An Answer to Thomas Paine’s Third Part of the Age of Reason.

When she was 64 she declared she would give birth to a child who would become a great spiritual leader on October 19, 1814. The appointed day came and went, Joanna Southcott fell into a trance, died on December 7 the same year, and was buried in St John’s Wood Chapel.

She left a mysterious locked wooden box which was not to be opened until England was in a crisis, and then only in the presence of all 24 bishops of the Church of England (there were only 24 at the time), who were to spend a fixed period of time beforehand studying Southcott’s prophecies.

Her followers unsuccessfully tried to get the bishops to do so in both the Crimean War and World War I. When ‘Joanna Southcott’s Box’ was finally opened in the presence of a solitary, reluctant prelate (the Bishop of Grantham) in 1927, it was found to contain a few inconsequential items and papers, a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol.

From Wikipedia: However, the followers of Southcott later claimed that the box opened was not the authentic one. An advertising campaign on billboards and in British national newspapers such as the Sunday Express was run in the 1960s and 1970s by what is viewed as the most prominent group of Southcottians, the Panacea Society in Bedford (formed 1920), to try to persuade the 24 bishops to have the box opened. Their slogan was: "War, disease, crime and banditry will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box." According to the Panacea Society, this true box is in their possession at a secret location for safekeeping, with its whereabouts only to be disclosed when a meeting with the bishops has been arranged. Southcott prophesied that the Day of Judgement would come in the year 2004, and her followers state that if the contents of the box have not been studied beforehand, the world will have to meet it unprepared.

The efforts of the Society have so far been unsuccessful; Church of England officials, including the Rt. Rev. David Farmborough (Bishop of Bedford) have commented that for them to take part in the opening would be to unnecessarily arouse public interest in the affair. The story of the box has become something of a source of ridicule in Britain – for example, it featured in a sketch by Monty Python's Flying Circus in the 1970s.

“At her request and the insistence of her followers her body was kept warm for four days and four nights before a dissection to ascertain the truth of the pregnancy and the cause of death was performed. She was then buried at night, to avoid drawing crowds. The results of the dissection (no baby, and no established cause of death: appearance of pregnancy the result of flatulence and ‘extensive omental fat’) were publicly available.”   Source

Joanna Southcott website    Joanna Southcott collection     More

September 6, 1936 Today was supposed to be the day the earth would die, according to George Riffert in his book The Great Pyramid: Its Divine Message (1925). Riffert wrote in later editions: “A very real problem was, and still is to ascertain the literal significance and character of the epoch whose crisis date was September 6, 1936”.

David Berg (aka Moses, King David, Mo, Moses David, Moses David Berg, Father David, Dad, or Grandpa; 1919 - '94), founder of the highly controversial Children of God, later known as The Family of Love or The Family and currently The Family International.

He predicted California would be destroyed by an earthquake. He also prophesied that the USA would be destroyed by Comet Kohoutek by January 1974 (Mo Letter #280, para. 12) and that Jesus Christ would return in 1993.

1975 Adelaide, South Australia: House painter John Nash had predicted earthquake and tidal waves to destroy city on this day, and quite a few people took him seriously. The state premier, Don Dunstan (1926 - '99), however, was one of many who thought it was nonsense. Dunstan, somewhat in the manner of King Canute, went to the seashore and stood, defying the prophecy. Nothing extraordinary happened. The largest wave measured was 15 cm.

Contemporary news clipping of the non-event

November 24, 1993 The world failed to end on the day promised by Maria Devi Christos, the self-styled Final Incarnation of God on Earth. The Ukrainian cult leader claimed to have 144,000 followers.

Marshall Applewhite (1931 - '97), a leader (with Bonnie Nettles, d. 1985) of the Heaven's Gate cult; he died in the cult's suicide on or about March 26, 1997. Heaven’s Gate believed that Comet Hale-Bopp was associated with apocalyptic prophecies, and their suicide was timed just prior to when it passed perihelion on April 1, 1997.

May 5, 2000 Conjunction of all traditional planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and the Sun and Moon. Richard Noone, author of the popular book 5/5/2000 Ice: the Ultimate Disaster (1995; Three Rivers Press; 390 pp, paperback; $16; ISBN 0-609-80067-1), had predicted that the Antarctic ice mass would be three miles thick by this date, causing floods of biblical proportion and resulting in an icy death for the whole of planet Earth.  

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

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External Links

It's the End of the World as We Know It ... Again    Links

More failed predictions    And more

The Psychology of Gullibility

10 Failed Doomsday Predictions

Ellen G White and Adventism: From the Great Disappointment to A Worldwide Movement

Center for Millennial Studies: Links

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