By 1843, some 50,000 Millerites
were looking for Jesus to return within the year. For these Millerites, the
momentous nature of Christ’s return had been foretold for over a decade by
various signs in the heavens. Miller and his followers had long looked to the
night skies to read God’s will in what many considered to be a “heavenly
scroll” full of God’s messages. One of
the most important of these scrolls arrived during the night of November 12,
1833. That night, Millerites along with the rest of America witnessed the
falling of as many as 150,000 meteors or roughly “forty-one meteors per second”
(fig. 10.3).
Twentieth-century astronomers
would name the event “the Leonid meteor storm” (after the constellation of Leo
where such meteor storms originate), claiming it as the greatest meteor shower
to occur in the last three hundred years. So bright did the shower make the sky
that some awoke and thought it was daytime or that a great fire had started
somewhere nearby. Such an unprecedented
and terrifying display of divine power was interpreted by the Millerites as a
sure sign that the Earth’s final days were near. When Halley’s Comet of 1835 appeared, it was
just one more cosmic confirmation that Christ stood poised to inaugurate a new
age. (Paul C. Gutjahr, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in
Extraterrestrial Life [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026], 2149
of 8588 of Kindle ed.)
FIGURE 10.3. The meteor shower of
1833 was a heavenly event that demonstrated how God used astronomical phenomena
to communicate with humanity. Author’s collection. (Paul C. Gutjahr, Faith
in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2026],2169 of 8588 of Kindle ed.)
