A highly significant edition of one of the most influential theological works of the 19^th century.

The Boston edition of Miller’s lectures, here issued for the first time in 1840, represents the William Miller and the Millerite movement's arrival on the national stage. He had been lecturing since the early 1830s, but his views had circulated primarily through newspapers, pamphlets, and oral lectures. The publication of his lectures in book form was a crucial step in systematizing and legitimizing the movement, and Boston, the center of New England's religious and publishing culture, was not an accidental choice. B. B. Mussey was a legitimate commercial publisher, not a sectarian vanity press, which signals that by 1840 Millerism had sufficient mainstream audience to be commercially viable. This edition is thus a marker of the movement's transition from a regional revivalist phenomenon into a movement with national interest and influence.

The year 1840 is also critically important in the internal chronology of Millerism. This was the year Joshua V. Himes, a Christian Connexion minister and extraordinarily gifted organizer, threw his full energy behind Miller's cause. Himes recognized that Miller had a world-historical message but almost no apparatus for disseminating it, and he set about remedying this with remarkable speed, founding the journal Signs of the Times in Boston in 1840, organizing large-scale camp meetings, and orchestrating exactly the kind of book publication represented by this edition. The 1840 Mussey edition is in effect one of the first fruits of the Himes-Miller partnership, and understanding it requires understanding Himes's role as the movement's indispensable publicist. Miller provided the theology; Himes provided the infrastructure.

The title itself, as it appears in this edition, is also worth noting. The phrase "about the Year 1843" reflects a deliberate imprecision that Miller maintained in his early public formulations. He was careful, at least initially, not to specify an exact date, presenting his calculation as a scholarly probability rather than a prophetic certainty. Later editions and especially later Millerite publications became progressively more specific, eventually settling on the precise date of October 22, 1844, a chronological refinement introduced by Samuel Snow in 1844 and known as the "seventh-month message." The 1840 edition thus captures Miller at a moment before the movement's apocalyptic expectations had hardened into the kind of date-specific certainty that made the Great Disappointment so psychologically devastating for so many followers.

A very nice example, published precisely at the hinge point when Millerism transformed from a regional curiosity into a national movement. It is one of the foundational primary sources for understanding that transformation, and a foundational work for any serious library or archive collection focused on antebellum American religion, eschatology, or the roots of Adventism.

Miller, William. Evidence from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ, about the Year 1843; Exhibited in a Course of Lectures. Boston. B. B. Mussey. 1840. 300pp.

Good - example in original cloth with some light crimping and discoloration to cloth from early dampstain, first few signatures with a dampstain at the lower edge. Front interior hinge all but detached where mull has given way and the ffep is lacking. Else sound with some scattered foxing.