vision, "written within and without with mourning,
lamentation, and woe." September sunsets, changing forests, moonrise
and cloud, sun and rain,--I for one am contented with them. They fill
my heart with a sense of beauty. I see in them the perfect work of
infinite love as well as wisdom. It may be that our Advent friends,
however, coincide with the opinions of an old writer on the prophecies,
who considered the hills and valleys of the earth's surface and its
changes of seasons as so many visible manifestations of God's curse, and
that in the millennium, as in the days of Adam's innocence, all these
picturesque inequalities would be levelled nicely away, and the flat
surface laid handsomely down to grass.

As might be expected, the effect of this belief in the speedy
destruction of the world and the personal coming of the Messiah, acting
upon a class of uncultivated, and, in some cases, gross minds, is not
always in keeping with the enlightened Christian's ideal of the better
day. One is shocked in reading some of the "hymns" of these believers.
Sensual images,--semi-Mahometan descriptions of the condition of the
"saints,"--exultations over the destruction of the "sinners,"--mingle
with the beautiful and soothing promises of the prophets. There are
indeed occasionally to be found among the believers men of refined and
exalted spiritualism, who in their lives and conversation remind one of
Tennyson's Christian knight-errant in his yearning towards the hope set
before him:

"to me is given
Such hope I may not fear;
I long to breathe the airs of heaven,
Which sometimes meet me here.

"I muse on joys that cannot cease,
Pure spaces filled with living beams,
White lilies of eternal peace,
Whose odors haunt my dreams."

One of the most ludicrous examples of the sensual phase of Millerism,
the incongruous blending of the sublime with the ridiculous, was
mentioned to me not long since. A fashionable young woman in the
western part of this State became an enthusiastic believer in the
doctrine. On the day which had been designated as the closing one of
time she packed all her fine dresses and toilet valuables in a large
trunk, with long straps attached to it, and, seating herself upon it,
buckled the straps over her shoulders, patiently awaiting the crisis,--
shrewdly calculating that,