Coming To America

There’s a book, written by a man who died in 1885, that is finally being translated into English and brought to America. It’s called The End of the Present World (and the Mysteries of the Future Life), by Father Charles Arminjon.

A fourteen year old girl read it in 1887 and was so inspired she became a nun. Not just any nun either. She eventually became Therese the Little Flower - a saint.

While the book's exhortations on hell, purgatory, and Heaven were what seems to have most inspired the saint, it's not known what she thought of the lengthy discussion in the book of the anti-christ, Second Coming, and end of the world. Father Arminjon does not claim special knowledge, but presents intriguing scenarios based on the Bible and tradition. In fact, it's how the book -- chapter after chapter -- starts.

Here are the opening lines of the book:

"It has seemed to us that one of the saddest fruits of rationalism, the fatal error and great plague of our century, the pestilential sources from which our revolutions and social disasters arise, is the absence of the sense of the supernatural and the profound neglect of the great truths of the future life."

I think I’m going to look for this book.