And the time was fixed then and there.

Brother Hall was astonished.

And Brother Goshorn drew down his face, and said that he didn’t know what was to become of good, old-fashioned Methodism and the rules of the Discipline, if the presiding elders talked in that sort of a way.  The church was going to the dogs.

CHAPTER XL.

SELLING OUT.

The flight of the Hawk did not long dampen the ardor of those who were looking for signs in the heaven above and the earth beneath.  I have known a school-master to stand, switch in hand, and give a stubborn boy a definite number of minutes to yield.  The boy who would not have submitted on account of any amount of punishment, was subdued by the awful waiting.  We have all read the old school-book story of the prison-warden who brought a mob of criminals to subjection by the same process.  Millerism produced some such effect as this.  The assured belief of the believers had a great effect on others; the dreadful drawing on of the set time day by day produced an effect in some regions absolutely awful.  An eminent divine, at that time a pastor in Boston, has told me that the leaven of Adventism permeated all religious bodies, and that he himself could not avoid the fearful sense of waiting for some catastrophe—­the impression that all this expectation of people must have some significance.  If this was the effect in Boston, imagine the effect in a country neighborhood like Clark township.  Andrew, skeptical as he was visionary, was almost the only man that escaped the infection.  Jonas would have been as frankly irreverent if the day of doom had come as he was at all times; but even Jonas had come to the conclusion that “somethin’ would happen, or else somethin’ else.”  August, with a young man’s impressibility, was awe-stricken with thoughts of the nearing end of the world, and Julia accepted it as settled.

It is a good thing that the invisible world is so thoroughly shut out from this.  The effect of too vivid a conception of it is never wholesome.  It was pernicious in the middle age, and clairvoyance and spirit-rapping would be great evils to the world, if it were not that the spirits, even of-the ablest men, in losing their bodies seem to lose their wits.  It is well that it is so, for if Washington Irving dictated to a medium accounts of the other world in a style such as that of his “Little Britain,” for instance, we should lose all interest in the affairs of this sphere, and nobody would buy our novels.

This fever of excitement kept alive Samuel Anderson’s determination to sell his farms for a trifle as a testimony to unbelievers.  He found that fifty dollars would meet his expenses until the eleventh of August, and so the price was set at that.

As soon as Andrew heard of this, he privately arranged with Jonas to buy it; but Mrs. Anderson utterly refused.  She said she could see through it all.  Jonas was one of Andrew’s fingers.  Andrew had got to be a sort of a king in Clark township, and Jonas was—­was the king’s fool.  She did not mean that any of her property should go into the hands of the clique that were trying to rob her of her property and her daughter.  Even for two weeks they should not own her house!