WHEN JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES was twenty, he was obsessed with knowing the nature and timing of the Last Days. As he recalled later, My heart was fixed on the Millennium, and I was resolved to live or die for it .1 His fascination with the end of history was neither novel for his own time nor for ours-indeed, the recent events at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, suggest that we are in the throes of a period of millenarian fervor every bit as intense as that of the 1830S and\u2740s. Although we can see Noyes as representative, gripped like many of his age-mates with apocalyptic dreams, in his case the dreams were refracted through a quite untypical psyche