Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine, to my
childish thoughts:--

"O grave, where is thy 'victory?
O death, where is thy sting?"

My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better
home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home,
too.

Meanwhile the millennium was coming, and some people thought it was
very near. And what was the millennium? Why, the time when everybody on
earth would live just as they do in heaven. Nobody would be selfish,
nobody would be unkind; no! not so much as in a single thought. What a
delightful world this would be to live in then! Heaven itself could
scarcely be much better! Perhaps people would not die at all, but, when
the right time came, would slip quietly away into heaven, just as Enoch
did.

My father had believed in the near millennium. His very last writing,
in his sick-room, was a penciled computation, from the prophets, of the
time when it would begin. The first minister who preached in our
church, long before I was born, had studied the subject much, and had
written books upon this, his favorite theme. The thought of it was
continually breaking out, like bloom and sunshine, from the stern
doctrines of the period.

One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal. Were people
going to be made good in spite of themselves, whether they wanted to or
not? And what would be done with the bad ones, if there were any left?
I did not like to think of their being killed off, and yet everybody
must be good, or it would not be a true millennium.

It certainly would not matter much who was rich, and who was poor, if
goodness, and not money, was the thing everybody cared for. Oh, if the
millennium would only begin now! I felt as if it were hardly fair to me
that I should not be here during those happy thousand years, when I
wanted to so much. But I had not lived even my short life in the world
without leading something of my own faults and perversities; and when I
saw that there was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart I
had to conclude that it might be a great way off, after all. Yet the
very thought of it brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day
and by night. It was coming, some time! And the people who were in
heaven would be as glad of it as those who remained on earth.

That it was a hard world for my mother and her children to live in at
present I could not help seeing. The older m