It really does not seem to me to be altogether like the roll which the angel bore in the prophet's 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.