ence towards God in the churches and towards priests and spiritual superiors, and the fall of the Roman empire, which the Apostle St. Paul alludes to, according to Tertullian, St. Jerome, and St. Cyril. All these are signs of the approaching end of the world and the terrible day of judgment. Therefore St. John writes in his first Epistle: “Little children, it is the last hour.”[1] These are, as St. Ambrose and St. Chrysostom say, the sickness of the earth which is to precede its death; “because we are in the dying moments of the world, certain sicknesses of the world must go before.”[2] “A sickness of the world is famine, a sickness of the world is plague, a sickness of the world is war and persecution;” by these things God reminds us that it is approaching the end, so that we may not become too attached to it, too fond of it. Other signs of the coming of the last day, besides the fall of the Roman empire, are the advent of Antichrist and the terrible portents in the sun, moon, and stars, and the distress of all nations on earth, of which we read in to-day’s Gospel. This latter class of signs I shall take as my subject, my dear brethren, to-day and during Advent, and shall try with God’s help to deduce from them some moral doctrine for our advantage. To-day I begin with the first, namely, the coming and the tyranny of Antichrist.
Plan of Discourse.
Who shall Antichrist be, and what has he to do in the world? That I shall explain in the first part. What should be our thoughts regarding this? This shall be the moral lesson of the second part.
Give us Thy light and grace, future Judge of the living and the dead, Christ Jesus; we ask it through the merits of Thy Mother Mary and the prayers of our holy guardian angels.
What kind of a man Antichrist shall be. Who then is Antichrist? Of what nature shall he be? In the Scripture the Holy Ghost never gives him a proper name, because, as St. Irenaeus says, He did not wish to mention the name of such a wicked man; therefore He calls him only Antichrist, that is, one who is opposed to Christ in everything. The Prophet Daniel names him “a beast, terrible and wonderful, and
