Abner slowly shook his head. He understood perfectly those utterances of the girl, which from time to time filled Eustace with absolute bewilderment. One result of the awakening of spiritual perception, and of the unceasing prayer which had been offered up by all sorts and conditions of men for many years, had been a deep and earnest conviction that the Second Advent was at hand, that the French Revolution was but the commencement of the Great Apostasy of the latter days, and that the times of the end were approaching. Amongst all the confusion of prophetic interpretation stirring the minds of men and raising up countless differences of opinion and beliefs as to what was coming upon the earth, there stood out one paramount conviction which attracted multitudes to adhere to it, which was that before the final judgments were to be poured upon the earth, as foretold in the Revelation according to St. John, there would be a gathering together of the first-fruits to Christ--the dead and living saints called alike to meet Him in the air, and thus escape the horrors that were coming upon the world--the company typified in Scripture as the hundred and forty-four thousand sealed ones standing with the Lamb upon Mount Zion before the last vials of wrath are poured out, and before the resurrection of the multitude whom no man can number, who have come scathlessly through the great tribulation of the days of Antichrist. This had been the unshaken conviction of the Duchess, and Bride had received it from her mother with an absolute trust. Abner, like many men of his class and race, was equally filled with a devout hope and expectation of living to see the Lord appear without sin unto salvation. The wave of revived spirituality and personal faith which had swept over the West-Country with the advance of Methodism a generation before, had, as it were, prepared the minds of men for a fresh development of faith in the fulfilment of God’s prophetic word. Methodism itself had already begun to fossilise to a certain extent into a system, and had been rent by faction and split into hostile camps; but this new wave of awakened spirituality was sweeping over the land with all its first strength, and destined in one form or another to do a great work in the Church. The thought and the hope of the Kingdom was one so familiar and so congenial to those who had accepted it, that already they were striving after the life of the Kingdom in the present world of sorrow and sin. To Bride it was the very source and centre of all her happiness in life, and anything that turned her thoughts back to it again brought solace and comfort with it; so that even the hope that the darkness and perplexity around her would be explained and made clear in the Kingdom, and that what she now saw with pain and shrinking would at last prove to be God’s way of bringing good out of the mass of evil engendered by the sin and disobedience of man,