Tis a bitter pang under any circumstances to find another preferred to yourself. It is about the same blow as one would probably feel if falling from a balloon. I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, Go and measure the temple of God and the alter, and count the worshipers there. However, exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Nations. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months. And I will give power to my two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the Earth. If anyone tries to harm them, words that will burn your soul comes from their mouths and devours their critics. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. These men and women have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have the power to turn the waters into blood and strike the Earth with every kind of plague as often as they want.

Laugh at forebodings of evil, but tremble after daydreams of happiness. People reason and refine themselves into a thousand miseries, by choosing to settle that they can only be contented one way. The true art of happiness in this most whimsical World seems nothing more nor less than this: Let those who have leisure find employment and those who have business find leisure. Some people say that their school days were the happiest of their lives. They may be right, but I always look with suspicion upon those I hear saying this. It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable. Happiness is negative. Misery is optimistic. There is always a subtle doubt lingering upon our most substantial scenes of happiness; but with misery it is slow, certain and enduring; the proof conclusive and damning. It is more real than our existence, and exists when it is no more. Unhappiness soon makes us indifferent to mere locality. How easy it is to be happy, if you will only be good. Felicity is quaffed out of a golden cup in every latitude: the flavor is with you—with you alone—and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

Do you imagine that if mortals had power over events, or were in reality free and uncontrollable agents in the history of their own existence, that you would see so many unhappy beings?—no certainly, for who would do that which would render him miserable, if he had the power of avoiding it? And if he had that power, yet chose nevertheless to be miserable, who would pity him?  Happiness is a mental enjoyment, and he that willfully thinks ill or indifferently of his neighbor is a disturber of his own tranquility. Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them. Their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sacramento and Roseville, where also their Lord was crucified. Fore three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language, and nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the Earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on Earth. However, after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. Then they heard a loud voice from Heaven saying to them, “Come up here.”

And they went up to Heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on. There is nothing more difficult than to lay down any fixed and certain rules for happiness; or to judge with any precision of the happiness of others from the knowledge of external circumstances. He or she to whom content is given need ask no more. At that very hour there was a severe Earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the Earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of Heaven. The second woe has passed; the third woe is coming soon. The Seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in Heaven, which said: “The kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.”  I was never much displeased with those harmless delusions that tend to make us more happy. The best happiness I shall ever know, will be to escape the worst misery. And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign. The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great—and for destroying those who destroy the Earth.”

Then God’s temple in Heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the BMW of his covenant. And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an Earthquake of music and a great hailstorm of base. If a stray sunbeam steals in, the shadow is all the better for its cheerful glimmer. Their lives were rendered blissful by an unsought harmony with nature, heart-dilating happiness. In all cases, people must eventually lower, or at least shift, one’s conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country. To rush the World over seeking for happiness is a fool’s work. Now comes the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ. For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God Day and night, has been hurled down. They overcame him by the blood of the Christ and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore, rejoice, you Heavens and you who dwell in them! However, woe to the Earth and the sea, because the devil has some down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short. Jealousy, the filthy traitor to true affection, and yet disguising itself in the raiment of love. Many women are jealous without cause: I knew a woman that was ready to hang herself, for seeing but her husband’s shirt hang on a hedge with her maid’s smock and because her son was missing for months, and she knew that his neighbors have robbed him, threatened him and forced him to the group and sodomized him, and that no one would help him, not even when he reported the assaults. It was later uncovered that he was threatened and told not to contact his family.