The revivals by their very excesses deadened a normal antipathy toward religious eccentricity. And these pentecostal years, which coincided with Joseph Smith’s adolescence and early manhood, were the most fertile in America’s history for the sprouting of prophets. In the same decade that young Joseph announced his mission, William Miller proclaimed that Jesus would visit the earth in March 1843 and usher in the millennium. Thousands flocked to his ranks, auctioned off their property, and bought ascension robes. John Humphrey Noyes was converted to the theory that the millennium had already
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