A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

"O grave, where is thy 'victory? O death, where is thy sting?" My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home, too. Meanwhile the millennium was coming, and some people thought it was very near. And what was the millennium? Why, the time when everybody on earth would live just as they do in heaven. Nobody would be selfish, nobody would be unkind; no! not so much as in a single thought. What a delightful world this would be to live in then! Heaven itself could scarcely be much better! Perhaps people would not die at all, but, when the right time came, would slip quietly away into heaven, just as Enoch did. My father had believed in the near millennium. His very last writing, in his sick-room, was a penciled computation, from the prophets, of the time when it would begin. The first minister who preached in our church, long before I was born, had studied the subject much, and had written books upon this, his favorite theme. The thought of it was continually breaking out, like bloom and sunshine, from the stern doctrines of the period. One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal. Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves, whether they wanted to or not? And what would be done with the bad ones, if there were any left? I did not like to think of their being killed off, and yet everybody must be good, or it would not be a true millennium.