Confident that these “remnants of Jacob” would soon swell the ranks of the church, Phelps hailed each tribe triumphantly in theEvening and Morning Star. The world for him was blazing with signs of Christ’s coming, which he ventured to predict was less than nine years away. Revolution stirred in a dozen countries in the early thirties; South Carolina, thirty years before the Civil War, threatened to split the United States by secession; a plague of “fiery serpents” ravaged India; thirty thousand natives starved in the Cape Verde Islands; Asiatic cholera began to devastate the Atlantic seaboard;
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