"No, God. No!
"Thou knowest that I cannot preach.
"I cannot preach!"
Before William Miller surrendered to the Lord and became the leader of the great Second Advent awakening in America, he argued with God and struggled with his conscience for thirteen years. It needs to be emphasized at the outset that he did not want to tell the world that Christ was coming soon. [1]
In an age when nine tenths of the American population lived on farms, William Miller too was a farmer. But he was not an ordinary one. As a boy, after the family had fallen asleep, he had read books, Lincoln style, by the light of pitch knots in his log cabin in Low Hampton, New York. Married in 1803 and settled among the Green Mountains, in Poultney, Vermont, he quickly exhausted the local library. His new wife, Lucy, did many of the farm chores herself so he could find extra time for study. Sociable and energetic as well as studious, Miller was successively elected constable, deputy sheriff, and justice of the peace. Soon he was wealthy enough to own two horses, wise enough to have close friendships in both political parties of the day--and worldly enough to give up his boyhood faith, such as it was, and turn Deist.
Brought up in a Baptist home, William as a lad had worried seriously for a time about his soul. He tried to find peace by strict obedience to his parents and by sacrificing cherished possessions, but to no avail. He continued to believe the Bible, but he fretted over its seeming ineffectiveness and contradictions. But after his marriage, in the days when America was young, Miller read the books that Jefferson, Franklin, and the other Founding Fathers had read the writings of David Hume, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine. Other thinking people in Poultney read the same books, and soon he adopted Deism, their attractive but superficial philosophy about the universe.
According to Deism, God created the world and set it in operation under unalterable laws of cause and effect. In harmony with these laws, men ought to live clean, kindly, and honest lives; but to believe in prayer, a Saviour, or life after death was regarded as childish superstition. Miracles, forgiveness, and resurrection would require God to act contrary to His own natural laws, and this was unthinkable. God had wound up the world like a watch and left it to run on its own.
Not Christianity but decent, law-and-order Americanism would bring out the best in a man, Miller concluded; and his house became a regular meeting place for the patriotic but irreligious couples of his new hometown.
Back in Hampton, Miller's mother heard what was going on in Poultney and was deeply concerned. She begged her brother-in-law and her aging father, both of them Baptist clergy, to visit William from time to time, and she promised that her prayers would go with them. William warmly welcomed Uncle Elihu and Grandfather Phelps, but after they left he mimicked them mischievously to the huge enjoyment of his friends.
Convinced that love of country rather than love for Christ was mankind's greatest hope, Miller volunteered for service in the War of 1812. Forty-seven others also volunteered, on condition that they serve directly under his command!
The War of 1812, America's second military struggle for independence, was a desultory, do-nothing affair most of the time. The Battle of Plattsburg, fought on a shore of Lake Champlain not many miles from Miller's boyhood home, was a brilliant exception.
On the morning of September 11, 1814, the British boasted a land force of 15,000 regulars and a small, well-equipped navy on the lake. The Americans numbered only 5500, gloomily certain of defeat.
The outcome was a total surprise.
"Sir: It is over, it is done," reported an enthusiastic American officer at twenty minutes past two that afternoon. "The British fleet has struck to the American flag. Great slaughter on both sides--they are in plain view, where I am now writing.... The sight was majestic, it was noble, it was grand. This morning, at ten o'clock the British opened a very heavy and destructive fire upon us, both by water and land. Their ... rockets flew like hailstones.... You have no idea of the battle.... You must conceive what we feel, for I cannot describe it."
The officer reviewed with pride the part that he had played. "I am satisfied that I can fight. I know I am no coward.... Three of my men are wounded by a shell which burst within two feet of me."
"Huzza! Huzza!" he exclaimed in his excitement; and then, as twenty or thirty prisoners were led into the fort, he carefully signed his name: "Yours forever, William Miller."
The war ended in 1815. Captain William Miller had demonstrated his aptitude for leadership years before he involuntarily founded a religious movement.
But as he returned home to milk and plow and sow and reap, his mind probed restlessly into the religion of the patriots. By the law of cause and effect, he reasoned, the victory at Plattsburg ought to have gone to the British. Their troops were veterans who had just defeated Napoleon, and they outnumbered the Americans three to one. A modern historian has called Plattsburg the "decisive action" of the war, [2] and the American commodore, in his report to the war office at the time, gave the glory to God: "The Almighty has been pleased to grant us a signal victory." [3] Was it possible, perhaps, that God had taken a personal interest in America? And what about the shell that exploded at his feet without hurting him or killing his friends? Was there a God who cared?
He moved from Poultney back to Low Hampton. His father having died, he paid off the mortgage on his boyhood home so his mother could live on the place debt free; then he settled on 200 acres nearby.
To be polite, Miller attended the local Baptist church whenever his uncle had the sermon. Otherwise he stayed away.
"We missed you at service last Sunday," said his mother tenderly.
"You can't expect me there when Uncle's gone, Mother."
"Why not, my son?"
"It's the way the deacons read the sermon."
"They do the best they can, I'm sure."
"When Uncle's away, Mother, why don't they let me read it?"
Thus Miller unwittingly set a trap for himself, and the good brethren whom he laughed at so merrily made sure that he was caught in it. The sermons they assigned him to read from Alexander Proudfit's Practical Discourses sobered him.
His doubts about Deism deepened.
September 11, 1816, rolled around, the second anniversary of the victory at Plattsburg. A public dance was scheduled; a sermon, too, on the night before. The visiting evangelist sent the people home bathed in tears. A revival was on and the dance was off. Next Sunday it was Miller's turn to read again, this time a homily in Proudfit called, "The Duty of Parents to Their Children." [4] Overcome by emotion in the middle, he could not make it to the end.
In despair over his sins, Miller imagined how good it would be to throw himself into the arms of a Saviour and trust completely in His grace.
He needed a Saviour. The world needed a Saviour. But did such a wonderful being exist?
Back to the Bible he went; and in its covers he found the Saviour whom he sought. "I was constrained to admit that the Scriptures must be a revelation from God," he wrote later. "They became my delight, and in Jesus I found a friend." [5]
Immediately he began regular family worship. But his worldly friends taunted him now, as before he had often taunted other Christians. "How do you know the Bible is the Word of God?" they teased. "What about its contradictions?"
"If the Bible is the Word of God," Miller responded staunchly, "then everything it contains can be understood, and all its parts made to harmonize. Give me time, and I'll harmonize its apparent contradictions or I'll be a Deist still."
Laying aside every book except the Bible itself and Cruden's Concordance, he began with the first verse of Genesis 1 and advanced no more quickly than he could handle the problems that arose. Using the margin and the concordance, he let the Bible explain itself. One by one, most of its seemingly insoluble inconsistencies faded away.
Best of all, he found that Jesus, his loving Friend and Saviour, had promised to come again to earth! He found that many other prophetic promises had been fulfilled, so why not this one? Then one day he came across the text that was to mark him for the rest of his life, Daniel 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed."
His study intensified dramatically, sometimes lasting all day; sometimes all night. Correctly, he determined (using Ezekiel 4:6 and other texts) that the 2300 days were 2300 years, and that they began in 457 BC. Incorrectly he assumed that the "cleansing of the sanctuary" was the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. In 1818, after two years of undeviating concentration, he came to the startling conclusion that Christ would return "about the year 1843" (2300 years after 457 BC), and that "in about twenty-five years ... all the affairs of our present state would be wound up."
The end, within twenty-five years? Then others must be warned. A voice burned into his soul, "Go and tell it to the world."
For five years Miller brushed the call aside and vigorously analyzed his position. He was afraid, he wrote later, "lest by some possibility I should be in error, and the means of misleading any." More objections occurred to his mind than any of his opponents brought up later. When years of research removed all doubt, fear of public speaking took its place. "I told the Lord I was diffident and had not the necessary qualifications."
Miller filled an increasingly active role in his local church. He paid ever closer attention to the conversion of sinners. And he shared his convictions about the coming of Christ with acquaintances and correspondents. But nothing could satisfy the persistent inner call to preach. By August 1831, after thirteen years of procrastination, the burden on his soul seemed suddenly insupportable.
"Go and tell it to the world.
"I have appointed you a watchman. Tell it to the world!"
He looked up from the Bible he was reading, deeply troubled by the call of God. Or was it a call of God? He must know beyond a doubt.
He pounded his fist on his desk. Stood up. Knelt down. And prayed, "No, God. No! Thou knowest that I cannot preach. I cannot preach.
"But perhaps it is Thy will for me to go.
"O Lord, I will enter into a covenant with Thee. If Thou wilt open the way; I mean, if Thou will send an invitation for me to preach, why, then, O God, I'll go."
He settled into his chair at ease. "Now," he mused, "I shall have peace, for if I receive an invitation, I know that God will attend me. But it isn't very likely," and he smiled contentedly, "that anyone will ask a fifty-year old farmer like myself to preach on the second coming of the Lord."
Within thirty minutes a loud knocking at the door aroused him.
"Who can that be, so excited on a Saturday morning?" he asked himself absentmindedly.
The knocking came again. "I had better go and see."
"Good morning to you, Uncle William," the boy at the door cried cheerily.
"Nephew Irving!" exclaimed Miller. "And what might you be doing sixteen miles from home so early in the morning?"
"Uncle William, I left before breakfast to tell you that our Baptist minister in Dresden is unable to speak at services tomorrow. Father sent me to make a request of you. He wants you to come and talk to us about the things you've been studying in the Bible. About the second coming of Christ. You know.
"Will you come?"
Notes: