Ask one of Jehovah's Witnesses

[Tonus]

Does it trouble you that your founder Charles Russell predicted "Christ's second advent," using some bizarre method known as "pyramidology," to occur in 1874, and yet nothing remotely of the sort took place?

There was a fairly brilliant con that Russell or Barbour pulled with that date. When it came and went without incident, they claimed that Christ had indeed returned... invisibly. He had taken his place on the throne of heaven and begun to judge mankind using the Elmer Fudd technique ("be vewwy vewwy quiet!"). It kept the flock on a string and avoided the headaches that Miller experienced after 1843 or 1844 when his own predictions of a second coming fell flat and the movement splintered.

Rutherford later discarded 1874 as a meaningful date and claimed that Russell had instead pegged 1914 as the date in which Jesus secretly ascended to the throne. That date worked a lot better for them (after they changed the initial prediction, which was that the war of Armageddon would be over by 1914) because they could now present it as a "significant year" due to the start of WW1. The story as told to the membership is that Russell predicted Jesus's "presence" (parousia) and the Last Days as beginning in 1914 and lo and behold! WW1 started and provided a sign that the metaphysical shit had hit the supernatural fan. It gave the organization a credibility as having the gift of prophecy and therefore having god's blessing.

Additional whitewashing of the years 1918 and 1919 give the impression of a tiny group of devout worshipers who were under vicious attack by Satan's minions and somehow --miraculously!-- survived to carry on the important preaching work commanded by Jesus. Since members are strongly warned against seeking outside information into the organization's past, this story has a strong effect on them.