Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn. I mused in my heart, saying, My advent experience has been the richest and brightest of all my Christian experience. If this has proved a failure, what was the rest of my Christian experience worth? Has the Bible proved a failure? Is there no God, no heaven, no golden home city, no paradise? Is all this but a cunningly devised fable? … The 22nd of October passed, making unspeakably sad the faithful … but causing the unbelieving and wicked to rejoice. All was still. No Advent Herald; no meetings as formerly. Everyone felt lonely, with hardly a desire to speak to anyone. Still in the cold world! No deliverance — the Lord [had] not come! No words can express the feelings of disappointment … It was a humiliating thing and we all felt it alike.
Life and Religious Experience (pp. 67-68), as quoted in Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails, “Unfulfilled Prophecies and Disappointed Messiahs,” p. 22 – cognitive dissonance, an extreme form of confirmation bias
– cognitive dissonance, an extreme form of confirmation bias