Yet so formidable was to be that last trial of the faith of Christians, so crucial that conclusive test of their charity, which was to “deceive, if it were possible, even the very elect,”[15] that the Spirit of Love, yearning for the safety of his regenerate ones, and compassionating the weakness of human nature, revealed its marks and signs in the fullest and most circumstantial detail; so that, warned of the danger, and recognizing it when it arrived, they might pass through it unhurt, whilst those who succumbed to it might be without excuse before the divine justice. It is the yearning of the heart of Christ towards his children, whom he foresees will fail by thousands in that decisive trial, which prompts the ejaculation that sounds almost like a lament over his own inability to put any pressure on their free-will: “When the Son of man cometh, will he find faith on the earth?” It is his anxiety, as it were, about the fate of his elect amidst the seductions of that appalling apostasy, which urged him, after he had indicated the signs that would accompany it, to be on the perpetual, sleepless lookout for them. “Be ever on the alert. Lo! I have foretold you all.”[16]
“Be ever on the alert, watch and pray. For you do not know when the time may be.”[17]
“Watch, then, lest when he (the head of the family) shall have come on a sudden, you be found sleeping.”[18]
“Moreover, what I say to you I say to all: Watch!”[19]
Throughout all the ages that have elapsed since those words of solemn import fell from the lips of Jesus Christ it has been the plain duty of all Christians—nay, of all to whose knowledge they were brought—to narrowly scrutinize events, to keep their attention fixed upon them, watching for the signs he foretold, lest they should appear unheeded, and they be seduced from the faith; or be the cause, through their indifference, of others being carried away in the great misleading.
But who now can be insensible to the predicted portents? So notorious are they, and so exactly do they answer to the description of them handed down to us from the beginning, that they rudely arouse us from sleep; that they force our attention, however indifferent to them we may be, however dull our faith or cold our charity. And when we see a vast organization advancing its forces in one united movement throughout the entire globe in an avowed attack, as insidious as it is formidable, upon altars, thrones, social order, Christianity, Christ, and God himself, where is the heart that can be insensible to the touching evidence of loving solicitude which urged Him whom surging multitudes of his false creatures were deliberately to reject in favor of a fouler being than Barabbas, to iterate so often the warning admonition, “Be ever on the watch”?
To study, therefore, the signs of the times, cannot be without profit to all, but especially to us who have but scant respect for the spirit of the age, who are not sufficiently enlightened by it to look upon Christ as nothing more than a remarkable man, the sublime morality he taught and set an example of as a nuisance, and his church as the enemy of mankind, to be extirpated from their midst, because it forbids their enjoying the illumination of the dagger-guarded secrets of the craft of Freemasonry.
To fix the date of the Dies iræ is completely out of our power. It is irreverent, if not blasphemous, to attempt it. It is of the counsels of God that it should come with the swiftness of “lightning” and the unexpectedness of “a thief in the night”; and that expressly that we may be ever on the watch. But the signs of its approach are given to us in order to help those who do not abandon “watching” in indifference, to escape the great delusion—the imposition of Antichrist—which is to immediately precede it. It is these signs we propose to study in the following pages.
The predictions of Christ himself on this subject are far more obscure than those subsequently given to us by his apostles. But this has always been God’s way of revelation to his creature. To Moses alone, in the mount, he revealed the moral law and that wondrous theocratic polity which remained even after the perversity of his people had given it a monarchical form; and Moses communicated it to the people. To the people Christ spoke in parables, “and without a parable spake he not unto them. But when he was alone with them, he explained all to his disciples.”[20] “To you,” he said, “it is given to have known the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to those without everything is a parable.”[21] The apostles themselves, who were to declare the revelation, in order to increase the merit of their faith, were not fully illuminated before the coming down of the Holy Spirit. “You do not know this parable?” he said; “and how are you going to understand all parables?”[22] To their utterances, therefore, it is we shall confine ourselves, as shedding as much light as it has seemed good to the Holy Ghost to disclose to us upon the profounder and more oracular predictions of God himself in the flesh.
Besides SS. Peter, Paul, and John, S. Jude is the only other apostle, we believe, who has bequeathed to the church predictions of the terrible apostasy of Antichrist which is to consummate the trial of the faith of the saints under the very shadow of the coming judgment. We will take them in the order in which they occur. The first is in a letter of S. Paul to the church at Thessalonica, where, exhorting them not to “be terrified as if the day of the Lord were at hand,” he assures them that it will not come “before there shall have first happened an apostasy, and the man of sin shall have been revealed, the son of perdition—he who opposes himself to, and raises himself above, all that is called God, or that is held in honor, so that he may sit in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God.… And you know what now is hindering his being revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already working; only so that he who is now keeping it in check will keep it in check until he be moved out of its way. And then will the lawless one be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and destroy with the illumination of his coming; whose coming is after the manner of working of Satan, with all strength and symbols, and lying absurdities, and in every enticement of iniquity in those who perish; for the reason that they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. So God will send them the working of error, that they may believe falsehood; that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity.”[23]