The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

42 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
but the event anticipated was wrong. Expressing what has become
a familiar justification, they had expected “the wrong thing at the
right time.”
This position was taken by a group which later came to be
known as the Seventh-Day Adventists. They declared that Jesus,
instead of descending to earth in 1844, entered the most holy place
of the heavenly sanctuary as mankind’s great high priest to
introduce the antitypical atonement day. 34 This group, which
separated from the rest of the “Second Adventists” in the end of
the 1840’s, caused the first major division within the original
movement.
Some leading Millerites who also held to the 1844 date—among
them Apollos Hale, Joseph Turner, Samuel Snow, and Barnett Matthias—
claimed that Jesus had indeed come as the Bridegroom in 1844,
although spiritually and invisibly, “not in personally descending
from heaven, but taking the throne spiritually.” In 1844, they declared,
the “kingdom of this world” had been given to Christ. 35
Offshoots of the Millerite movement
Thus, following 1844, the Millerite “Second Advent” movement
gradually broke into several Adventist groups. 36 A proliferation of
new dates began to appear: 1845, 1846, 1847, 1850, 1851, 1852,
1853, 1854, 1866, 1867, 1868, 1870, 1873, 1875, and so on, and
these dates, each having their promoters and adherents,
contributed to even greater fragmentation. A leading Second
Adventist, Jonathan Cummings, declared in 1852 that he had received
33 “That I have been mistaken in the time, I freely confess; and I have no desire to
defend my course any further than I have been actuated by pure motives, and it
has resulted in God’s glory. My mistakes and errors God, I trust, will forgive . . . .”
(Wm. Miller’s Apology and Defence, Boston, 1845, pp. 33, 34.) George Storrs, who
had been one of the leaders in the last stage of the Millerite movement, the socalled
“seventh month movement,” in which the advent had been finally fixed to
October 22, 1844, was even more outspoken. Not only did he openly and
repeatedly confess and regret his error, but he also declared that God had not been
in the “definite time” movement, that they had been “mesmerized” by mere human
influence, and that “the Bible did not teach definite time at all” (See D. T. Arthur,
op. cit., pp. 89–92.)
34 For a clarifying discussion of the development of this doctrine, see Dr. Ingemar
Linden, The Last Trump. A historico-genetical study of some important chapters in
the making and development of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (Frankfurt am
Main, Bern, Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1978), pp. 129–133. Years later the doctrine
was changed to mean that the so-called “investigative judgment” of the believers—
dead and living—began on October 22, 1844.
35 Froom, Vol. IV, p. 888. A detailed discussion of these views is given by Dr. D. T.
Arthur, op. cit., pp. 97–115.
36 In 1855 a prominent Second Adventist, J. P. Cowles, estimated that there existed
“some twenty-five divisions of what was once the one Advent body. (See D. T.
Arthur, op. cit., p. 319.)
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