eir poorer brethren until the end should
come. The awful day was awaited with glowing rapture of hope, or by some
with terror. When it dawned there was eager gazing upon the clouds of
heaven to descry the sign of the Son of man. And when the day had passed
without event there were various revulsions of feeling. The prophets set
themselves to going over their figures and fixing new dates; earnest
believers, sobered by the failure of their pious expectations, held
firmly to the substance of their faith and hope, while no longer
attempting to "know times and seasons, which the Father hath put within
his own power"; weak minds made shipwreck of faith; and scoffers cried
in derision, "Where is the promise of his coming?" A monument of this
honest delusion still exists in the not very considerable sect of
Adventists, with its subdivisions; but sympathizers with their general
scheme of prophetical interpretation are to be found among the most
earnest and faithful members of other churches.

Such has been the progress of Scriptural knowledge since the days when
Farmer Miller went to work with his arithmetic and slate upon the
strange symbols and enigmatic figures of the Old and New Testament
Apocalypses, that plain Christians everywhere have now the means of
knowing that the lines of calculation along which good people were led
into delusion a half-century ago started from utterly fallacious
premises. It is to the fidelity of critical scholars that we owe it that
hereafter, except among the ignorant and unintelligent, these two books,
now clearly understood, will not again be used to minister to the panic
of a Millerite craze, nor to furnish vituperative epithets for
antipopery agitators.

To this period also must be referred the rise of that system of
necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other
countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to
constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what
in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by
the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called
"spiritualism" in the "Rochester rappings," produced, to the wonder of
many witnesses, by "the Fox girls" in 1849. How the rappings and other
sensible phenomena were produced was a curious question, but not
important; the main question was, Did they convey communications from
the spirits of the dead, as the young women alleged, and as many p