e Second Adventist fanaticism will leave
less of that element behind. Its rage in America, under the
auspices of Miller, in the nineteenth century, was tame and feeble
when compared with the terror awakened in Europe in the fifteenth
century by Stofler's prediction of an approaching comet.23 Every
new discovery of the harmonies of science, and of the perfections
of nature, and of the developments of the linear logic of God
consistently unfolding in implicated sequences of peaceful order
unperturbed by shocks of failure and epochs of remedy, will
increase and popularize an intelligent faith in the original
ordination and the intended permanence of the present constitution
of things. Finally men will cease to be looking up to see the blue
dome cleave open for the descent of angelic squadrons headed by
the majestic Son of God, the angry breath of his mouth consuming
the world, cease to

23 Bayle, Historical Dictionary, art. Stofler, note B.

expect salvation by any other method than that of earnest and
devout truthfulness, love, good works, and pious submissiveness to
God, cease to fancy that their souls, after waiting through the
long sleep or separation of death, will return and take on their
old bodies again. Recognizing the Divine plan for training souls
in this lower and transient state for a higher and immortal state,
they will endeavor, in natural piety and mutual love, while they
live, to exhaust the genuine uses of the world that now is, and
thus prepare themselves to enter with happiest auspices, when they
die, the world prepared for them beyond these mortal shores.

These cheerful prophecies must be verified in the natural course
of things. The rapid spread of the doctrine of a future life
taught by the "Spirit rappers" is a remarkable revelation of the
great extent to which the minds of the common people have at last
become free from the long domination of the ecclesiastical dogmas
on that subject. The leading representatives of the "Spiritualists"
affirm, with much unanimity, the most comforting conclusions
as to the condition of the departed. They exclude all wrath
and favoritism from the disposition of the Deity. They have
little in fact, they often have nothing whatever to say of hell.
They emphatically repudiate the ordinarily taught terms of
salvation, and deny the doctrine of hopeless reprobation. All
death is beautiful and progressive. "Every form and thing is
constantly growing lovelier and ever