Jesus Christ, the wondrous Rock, struck and destroyed the Roman Empire and smashed its feet of clay. And we create and build up what God has shattered. Does not this mean that we defy God?
Look at Roman History. The Emperor Caligula saith: Everything is allowed to Caesar, “Omnia licent.” Not only to Roman Emperors, but nowadays to all knaves and servile creatures and quadrupeds, is everything permitted!
Nebuchadnezzar the King of Babylon saith, “I am God,” and he became a beast.
On Basil Island, in the house of the Tsaritsa Prascovie, there lives an old monk, Timothy Arkhípich, he is the refuge of the desperate, the hope of the hopeless, a mad man in the eyes of the world, yet he is intimately acquainted with the griefs and hearts of men. I went over to see him a few nights ago and had a talk with him. Arkhípich says Antichrist is a pretender—a veritable cursed one—and that he is on his way. I read the Metropolitan of Riazan’s Signs of the Coming of Antichrist, and a great fear thereupon possessed me.
In Moscow, Gregory of Talitsa was burnt because he spoke to the people about the coming of Antichrist. Talitsa was a man of great intelligence. Basil Levin, a captain of the Dragoons who was with me on my way from Lvoff to Kiev in 1711, the priest Lebedka, chaplain to Prince Ménshikoff the clerk Larion Dokoukin, and many others think in the same way about Antichrist.
A Raskolnik spilt Christ’s sacrament and trampled it under foot.