Memoirs of William Miller - Sylvester Bliss

here were sober, intelligent men, gentle and pious
women, who, verily believing the end to be close at
hand, had left their counting-rooms, and
workshops, and household cares, to publish the
great tidings, and to startle, if possible, a careless
and unbelieving generation into preparation for the
day of the Lord, and for that blessed millennium,
the restored Paradise; when, renovated and
renewed by its fire purgation, the earth shall
become, as of old, the ‘garden of the Lord,’ and the
saints alone shall inherit it.
“Very serious and impressive is the fact, that
this idea of a radical change in our planet is not
only predicted in the Scriptures, but that the earth
herself, in her primitive rocks and varying
formations, on which is lithographed the history of
successive convulsions, darkly prophesies of others
to come. The old poet prophets, all the world over,
have sung of a renovated world. A vision of it
haunted the contemplations of Plato. It is seen in
the half-inspired speculations of the old Indian
mystics. The Cumaean sibyl saw it in her trances.
The apostles and martyrs of our faith looked for it
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