records them. Such is the ghastly horror of a late tragedy
in Edgecomb, in the State of Maine. A respectable and thriving citizen
and his wife had been for some years very unprofitably engaged in
brooding over the mysteries of the Apocalypse, and in speculations upon
the personal coming of Christ and the temporal reign of the saints on
earth,--a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant in
Scripture as in reason. Their minds of necessity became unsettled; they
meditated self-destruction; and, as it appears by a paper left behind in
the handwriting of both, came to an agreement that the husband should
first kill his wife and their four children, and then put an end to his
own existence. This was literally executed,--the miserable man striking
off the heads of his wife and children with his axe, and then cutting his
own throat.

Alas for man when he turns from the light of reason and from the simple
and clearly defined duties of the present life, and undertakes to pry
into the mysteries of the future, bewildering himself with uncertain and
vague prophecies, Oriental imagery, and obscure Hebrew texts! Simple,
cheerful faith in God as our great and good Father, and love of His
children as our brethren, acted out in all relations and duties, is
certainly best for this world, and we believe also the best preparation
for that to come. Once possessed by the falsity that God's design is
that man should be wretched and gloomy here in order to obtain rest and
happiness hereafter; that the mental agonies and bodily tortures of His
creatures are pleasant to Him; that, after bestowing upon us reason for
our guidance, He makes it of no avail by interposing contradictory
revelations and arbitrary commands,--there is nothing to prevent one of a
melancholic and excitable temperament from excesses so horrible as almost
to justify the old belief in demoniac obsession.

Charles Brockden Brown, a writer whose merits have not yet been
sufficiently acknowledged, has given a powerful and philosophical
analysis of this morbid state of mind--this diseased conscientiousness,
obeying the mad suggestions of a disordered brain as the injunctions of
Divinity--in his remarkable story of Wieland. The hero of this strange
and solemn romance, inheriting a melancholy and superstitious mental
constitution, becomes in middle age the victim of a deep, and tranquil
because deep, fanaticism. A demon in human form, perceiving his state of