While a young man my attention was early called to the doctrines of the Universalists, but their doctrines did not seem to me to accord with the Sacred Scriptures; nor did I think that all men could be equally happy hereafter, when there is such a vast difference in their conduct and lives here. Genuine happiness is the result of right willing and doing; in other words, of keeping the commandments. I have no doubt but the Lord desires that all men should thus live and be happy; but we know that all men are not willing. Having created them free agents, God does not compel them here to love the Lord and their neighbor, which loves manifestly constitute heaven; what reason, then, have we to think He will compel them to do it hereafter? If a man deliberately leads an evil life here, growing ever stronger and more confirmed in that life, until he has made evil his good and rejoices in it, what reason have we to suppose or assume that he will change when he enters the next life? I am willing to leave him in the hands of the Lord--he has passed from my sight. I well remember the remarks of my grandmother when she was eighty-six years of age, a few days after the death of her husband, my grandfather. She said: "I do not fear to die, for I feel that God will do me no injustice." Within a few days she departed in peace. The Millerite excitement commenced when I was a young man. When I was about twenty years old I was traveling in central Massachusetts. One night there was a meeting of Millerites in the neighborhood where I was stopping, and I attended the meeting. The speaker was very zealous and earnest in his remarks. There was a comet with quite a long tail then visible, and he seemed to think that that comet, with its tail, might sweep across the track of our earth and work its destruction, which he anticipated. I remember very well my reflections on leaving that meeting. A few days before I had stood upon the side of a hill near the track, and had seen for the first time a railroad train on its way from Boston to Worcester. I said to myself: "Now we have railroads, steamboats, friction matches, temperance societies, Sunday-schools, the Bible translated into various languages, which but a few years ago were unknown. This great continent, from being a wilderness, inhabited by a comparatively few wild Indians, has been discovered and is being developed and cultivated by civilized and Christian people, and gradually being made capable of containing and sustaining hundreds of millions of inhabitants." With all these facts before me, I said to myself, "It looks a great deal more as though the world is just beginning to live; in fact, that a new era is dawning, than it does that the world is going to be destroyed." From that night the Millerite doctrine never troubled me any more, for I felt that I beheld, in all the wonderful inventions being made and changes going on in the world, the dawning light of a better day for the inhabitants of our earth.