CHAPTER XLI.

THE LAST DAY AND WHAT HAPPENED IN IT.

The religious excitement reached its culmination as the tenth and eleventh of August came on.  Some made ascension-robes.  Work was suspended everywhere.  The more abandoned, unwilling to yield to the panic, showed its effects on them by deeper potations, and by a recklessness of wickedness meant to conceal their fears.  With tin horns they blasphemously affected to be angels blowing trumpets.  They imitated the Millerite meetings in their drunken sprees, and learned Mr. Hankins’s arguments by heart.

The sun of the eleventh of August rose gloriously.  People pointed to it with trembling, and said that it would rise no more.  Soon after sunrise there were crimson clouds stretching above and below it, and popular terror seized upon this as a sign.  But the sun mounted with a scorching heat, which showed that at least his shining power was not impaired.  Then men said, “Behold the beginning of the fervent heat that is to melt the elements!” Night drew on, and every “shooting-star” was a new sign of the end.  The meteors, as usual at this time of the year, were plentiful, and the simple-hearted country-folk were convinced that the stars were falling out of the sky.

A large bald hill overlooking the Ohio was to be the mount of ascension.  Here gathered Elder Hankins’s flock with that comfortable assurance of being the elect that only a narrow bigotry can give.  And here came others of all denominations, consoling themselves that they were just as well off if they were Christians as if they had made all this fuss about the millennium.  Here was August, too, now almost well, joining with the rest in singing those sweet and inspiring Adventist hymns.  His German heart could not keep still where there was singing, and now, in gratefulness at new-found health, he was more inclined to music than ever.  So he joined heartily and sincerely in the song that begins: 

     “Shall Simon bear his cross alone,
       And all the world go free? 
     No, there’s a cross for every one,
       And there’s a cross for me. 
     I’ll bear the consecrated cross
       Till from the cross I’m free,
     And then go home to wear the crown. 
       For there’s a crown for me! 
     Yes, there’s a crown in heaven above,
       The purchase of a Saviour’s love. 
     Oh I that’s the crown for me!”

When the concourse reached the lines,

     “The saints have heard the midnight cry,
     Go meet him in the air!”

neither August nor any one else could well resist the infection of the profound and awful belief in the immediate coming of the end which pervaded the throng.  Strong men and women wept and shouted with the excitement.

Then Elder Hankins exhorted a little.  He said that the time was short.  But men’s hearts were hard.  As in the days of the flood, they were marrying and giving in marriage.  Not half a mile away a wedding was at that time taking place, and a man who called himself a minister could not discern the signs of the times, but was solemnizing a marriage.