That
which, through a distorted and doubtful medium, shone even upon the
martyr enthusiasts of the French revolution,--soft gleams of heaven's
light rising over the hell of man's passions and crimes,--the glorious
ideal of Shelley, who, atheist as he was through early prejudice and
defective education, saw the horizon of the world's future kindling with
the light of a better day,--that hope and that faith which constitute,
as it were, the world's life, and without which it would be dark and
dead, cannot be in vain.
I do not, I confess, sympathize with my Second Advent friends in their
lamentable depreciation of Mother Earth even in her present state. I
find it extremely difficult to comprehend how it is that this goodly,
green, sunlit home of ours is resting under a curse. 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.
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