A Millenarian Family: Uriah Adams and a Private Second Coming

Abstract

American spirituality in the first half of the nineteenth century was as diverse as the young nation's population. Optimism brought about by successful expansion led to the belief that society could be made perfect. In the secular world abolitionists, suffragists, temperance workers, education reformers, and others worked toward that perfection.1 Religious revivals led to an intense and emotional personal religious climate.2 Religious theorists sought knowledge of the millennium, the thousand years mentioned in Revelation 20, when holiness will prevail and Christ will reign on earth. In his comparison of the roots of millenarianism in Britain and the United States, Ernest R. Sandeen cites Britain's reaction to political reform as the impetus for the movement in that nation, while the momentum in the United States grew from the conviction that Americans were chosen people and their nation shining city upon hill.3 It was in this climate that William Miller, millenarian from western New England, set off one of the greatest mass delusions of the nineteenth century. Through an intense study of the Bible, Miller became convinced that he had found the answer to the greatest question of all: when would Christ the Savior return to gather the faithful to himself and destroy the world and its wicked inhabitants? Although members of the early Christian church had anticipated the return of Christ during their lifetimes, subsequent generations of believers understood the message of the scriptures to be symbolic rather than literal. Like Adventists on both sides of the Adantic, Miller espoused literal interpretation of the Bible. According to Sandeen, it was a hallmark of the millenarian party that literal rather than figurative or spiritualized fulfillments should be sought