William Miller of New England was a man of ordinary education who had been an army captain and a justice of the peace. Prolonged study of dates in the Bible had convinced him that all prophetic time except the Millennium would inevitably run out by 1844, perhaps as late in that year as October 22. A shy, unassuming man, he felt no urge to spread this belief until one day a voice within him said: 'Go and tell it to the world.' He struggled against the voice but was defeated; by the end of 1843 he had delivered 3,200 lectures on the coming of the Lord. Tens of thousands of Millerites were, in that year, proclaiming that the Lord would come in a cloud, that every eye would see Him, and that He would come as a thief in the night; the fact that these prophecies were contradictory bothered no one. (Marzieh Gail, Dawn Over Mount Hira, p. 159)