A Response to the Video:
Seventh-day Adventism, the Spirit Behind the Church

by Bob Pickle

Answers to Questions Raised by:
Mark Martin, Sydney Cleveland
Dale Ratzlaff, The White Lie
. . . and Others

Discern Fact from Fiction

The Millerite Movement

#9: [The picture used to illustrate #8, depicting fanatical adults crawling around like babies, and doing other inappropriate things.]

#9: This picture is of one of Miller's pre-October 22 meetings. It isn't at all, as any well-informed critic can verify. It was drawn to illustrate a description of a February 1845 meeting in Atkinson, Maine, when Miller was nowhere around.

The description appeared in an article in the March 7, 1845, issue of the Piscataquis Farmer. The article, which purports to be a condensed account of some court proceedings, is suspect because it was intentionally left anonymous, and the author was not present at the "fanatical" meeting in question. Additionally, he felt the need to excuse the errors of his account by calling it "imperfect" and by saying that he was "inexperienced." And since the article contains a number of contradictions regarding the meeting, what really happened is hard to determine.

We should remember that newspapers were not very reliable in their statements regarding Millerites. Take for example an article in the November 5, 1844, issue of The Daily Argus of Portland, Maine. It reprints information from The New York Commercial of the previous Friday that said that Himes had renounced Millerism the previous Tuesday evening. However, the Argus adds this note: "Someone else must have been mistaken for Elder Himes, as he was in this city on Wednesday last."

In the picture in the video, Mrs. White is shown having a vision in the way the Piscataquis article described, but she had no visions before October 22. Her first vision came in December 1844. James White is shown standing behind her, yet they did not begin associating and working together until 1845 (Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White, vol. 1, pp. 70, 71, 77). He could not have stood behind her in this manner, therefore, in 1844.

Which leaves us with the question, Why does the video use this picture to illustrate an example of a pre-October 22 meeting of William Miller?

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