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By Root 1043 0

followers, it bears observing that in the vast majority of cases, their faith was sincere. In keeping with the ethos of the time, the sincerity of that faith can be measured in works—or, sometimes, in the eschewal of work. Many Millerites declined to plant their fields in 1844, believing that the world would end before winter arrived. Of those who had planted in the spring, many left their crops to rot at harvest time, acknowledging before God that soon neither the righteous nor the damned would require earthly sustenance. Cattle and other farm animals were slaughtered to feed the hungry. Believers settled their worldly debts and gave the remainder of their money and property away, often to help their poorer brethren pay their bills.* Himes closed down his newspapers at the beginning of October, in anticipation of a time when journalism—that most worldly of professions—would be very much beside the point. In the final days before the expected end-time, families abandoned their homes and moved into churches, fields, and other communal places of worship to await judgment among the devout. This, then, was how the dawn of October 22 found the Millerites: hopeful, frightened, joyous, estranged from all but their fellow believers, in many cases newly homeless and penniless—and ready, deeply ready, to meet their maker.

We know what happens next, of course. The sun rises. The sun sets. The Messiah does not appear. The world fails to end. These events (or, more aptly, these non-events) are known to historians as the Great Disappointment. To modern ears, the word “disappointment” sounds strangely understated, but the Millerites themselves used it again and again to cover a broad and terrible swath of emotional terrain: shock, confusion, humiliation, despair, grief. A significant number of them left behind written accounts of that day, and many of these are eloquent in expressing that anguish. One such chronicler, a man named Washington Morse, averred that the “disappointment to the Advent believers…can find a parallel only in the sorrow of the disciples at the crucification [sic] of their Lord.” To another, Hiram Edson, “it seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.” And a third, Luther Boutelle, described how “unspeakably sad [were] the faithful and longing ones. Still in the cold world! No deliverance—the Lord not come!…All were silent, save to inquire, ‘where are we?’ and ‘what next?’”

What next, indeed? What do you do when you arise one morning certain that you will see your savior’s face and be taken into heaven by nightfall, only to have the next day dawn on a world wholly, dismally unchanged? What do you do about the unwelcome restoration of the day-to-day obligations of terrestrial life—crops to salvage, stores to tend, children to feed, the I-told-you-so’s of your neighbors to face?

As a practical matter, attending to these exigencies must have been the first order of business for the beleaguered Millerites. Philosophically, though, they faced another pressing issue. We know—and, for the most part, they could not help but know, too—that Millerite doctrine had been wrong. But how wrong? This question dogs almost every significant mistake we make. In the aftermath of our errors, our first task is always to establish their scope and nature. Where, precisely, did we go astray? Which wrong road did we take? And exactly how far down it did we travel?

These questions present us with both an intellectual and an emotional challenge. Figuring out where we went wrong can be genuinely puzzling—the conceptual equivalent of trying to retrace your steps in a dark woods. But facing up to the true scope and nature of our errors is also (and more self-evidently) psychologically demanding. Crucially, these two challenges are inseparable: if we can’t do the emotional work of fully accepting our mistakes, we can’t do the conceptual work of figuring out where, how, and why we made them. (That’s one reason why defensiveness is so bad for problem solving and progress of