All the Millerite preachers of that day were not quite so illiterate as Elder Hankins, and it is but fair to say that the Adventists of to-day are a very respectable denomination, doing a work which deserves more recognition from others than it receives.  And for the delusion which expects the world to come to an end immediately, the Adventist leaders are not responsible in the first place.  From Gnosticism to Mormonism, every religious delusion has grown from some fundamental error in the previous religious teaching of the people.  By the narrowly verbal method of reading the Scripture, so much in vogue in the polemical discussions of the past generation, and still so fervently adhered to by many people, the ground was prepared for Millerism.  And to-day in many regions the soil in made fallow for the next fanaticism.  It is only a question of who shall first sow and reap.  To people educated as those who gathered in Sugar Grove school-house had been to destroy the spirit of the Scripture by distorting the letter in proving their own sect right, nothing could be so overwhelming as Elder Hankins’s “figgers.”

For he had clearly studied figgers to the neglect of the other branches of a liberal education.  His demonstration was printed on a large chart.  He began with the seventy weeks of Daniel, he added in the “time and times and a half,” and what Daniel declared that he “understood not when he heard,” was plain sailing to the enlightened and mathematical mind of Elder Hankins.  When he came to the thousand two hundred and ninety days, he waxed more exultant than Kepler in his supreme moment, and on the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days he did what Jonas Harrison called “the blamedest tallest cipherin’ he’d ever seed in all his born days.”

Jonas was the new hired man, who had stopped into the shoes of August at Samuel Anderson’s.  He sat by August and kept up a running commentary, in a loud whisper, on the sermon, “My feller-citizen,” said Jonas, squeezing August’s arm at a climax of the elder’s discourse, “My feller-citizen, looky thar, won’t you?  He’ll cipher the world into nothin’ in no time.  He’s like the feller that tried to find out the valoo of a fat shoat when wood was two dollars a cord.  ’Ef I can’t do it by substraction I’ll do it by long-division,’ says he.  And ef this ’rithmetic preacher can’t make a finishment of this sub_lu_nary speer by addition, he’ll do it by multiplyin’.  They’s only one answer in his book.  Gin him any sum you please, and it all comes out 1843!”

Now in all the region round about Sugar Grove school-house there was a great dearth of sensation.  The people liked the prospect of the end of the world because it would be a spectacle, something to relieve the fearful monotony of their lives.  Funerals and weddings were commonplace, and nothing could have been so interesting to them as the coming of the end of the world, as described by Elder Hankins, unless it had been a first-class circus (with two camels