[86] With Mr. Miller, there were very many who deplored the spirit in which the Babylon question was handled by rash spirits, and a very few, including Mr. Miller, never accepted the view that the term applied to all corrupted Christianity, Protestant as well as Papal. But we do not regard the error of these a tithe as injurious to the cause of truth and religion as the conduct of selfish and rash ones who held the truth in unrighteousness. J. W. [87] The reader may now understand the real position of the man whom God had led in the great movement which occurred in fulfillment of the first message of Rev. 14. We believe that the third message, now being proclaimed, and the preparatory work for the coming of the Son of man now in progress with those who embrace it, is by the direct providence of God, in fulfillment of certain portions of his word. And this position makes the conclusions that the first and second messages of the same series were given under the same providence, and that God raised up William Miller to bring out the great truths of the first message, appear very reasonable. Hence we are the more willing to let him speak for himself, that the candid reader may correctly view this representative and providential servant of Jesus Christ, whose name is associated in the public mind with Adventism everywhere. But few public men “grow old gracefully.” Mr. Miller entered upon his public labors as a lecturer upon the prophecies in the strength of manhood, after acquiring habits of self-reliance, firmness, and undaunted courage, as an army and civil officer. And this stamp of character, sanctified by the grace of God, constituted one of the important qualifications necessary to meet the different forms of determined opposition and persecution which he met. And then, after nerving himself to the battle for thirteen years, forming the strongest combative habits at that period of his life when he was about sixty years of age, when strong men’s habits generally become very strongly established, to see him calmly and gently laying off the armor, and under his bitter disappointment, to witness his resignation to the will of God, and his affectionate appeals and warnings to his younger brethren to be holy men of God, ready for the coming of the Son of man, carries the strongest conviction to candid minds that God had raised him up to do the very work which he did do. As he thus laid his armor off, he said to his brethren that his work was done. In this we can see the hand of God. He had spent the strength of his ripe manhood in giving the first message. His burden fell off, which he interpreted, for a short time, to mean that the work of warning sinners was done. But the great work of the third message was then in the future, and had God designed to use him in giving it, he would have given him a new lease of life, and opened the subject to his mind.