Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

17 I transformed into an event of deep metaphysical significance. Ellen White, for instance, the Adventist visionary "linked the delay of the Advent to the need for morally improving God's people" (Butler 201). These Adventist and former Millerites followed a well-established pattern in moving from Apocalypse to Gnosis or from looking without to looking within. "Prophetic religion becomes apocalyptic when prophecy fails, and apocalyptic religion becomes Gnosticism when apocalypse fails, as fortunately it always has and, as we must hope, will fail again" (Bloom 30). The Millerites began with prophecy, continued with apocalypse, and when apocalypse failed in the Great Disappointment, they looked within themselves. That inner faith became, in turn, the basis for the establishment of a new religion. Kenelm Burridge, a sympathetic observer of millenarian movements describes the value of such experience. "Whether as fool, fraud, saint, respectable bourgeois, farmer or tycoon, the pain of the millennium belongs only to man. It is why he is man, why, when the time comes, he has to make a new man" (qtd. in Butler and Numbers xx). The Millerites believed in the reality of Apocalypse enough to make it the center of their lives and they were willing to risk all for their belief. Ironically, in their own way, and out of their Great Disappointment, they, too, like Thoreau, Dickinson, and Emerson had to "front [...] the essential facts of life" (Thoreau 62). The central, essential fact was the failure of their millennial beliefs. The world was no different on 23 October 1844 than it had been on 22 October except for their Great Disappointment. The earth and humans on it remained the product of billions of years of evolutionary activity. There would be no progress, no following time's arrow to the very End of Time, to the Day of Judgment, to the Parousia. Turning away from failed prophecy to gnosis, many Millerites followed a pattern of self-knowledge and self-reliance expostulated by Emerson, and embodied in the lives and works of Emerson, Dickinson, and 1 Butler describes how "these Adventists believed that on the fateful tenth day of the seventh month Christ [...] had come not to earth but had moved from the holy to the most holy place in a heavenly sanctuary. The "cleansing of the sanctuary" [a typical Millerite millennial belief] had not referred to Christ's Second Coming but rather to the investigation of the sins of God's people in preparation for the end of the world" (200). 232