iptures--you will pardon the liberty! I may
refer you not only to John's Epistles, to the revelations of the
dreamer of Patmos, but to so many learned doctors of the faith that it
would take a week merely to enumerate the titles of their works all
bearing on the mysterious subject. Our Holy Mother the Church has held
aloof from any doctrinal pronouncements. The Antichrist has been
predicted for the past thousand years. I recall as a boy poring over the
map of the world which a friend of my mother had left with her. This
lady my father called 'the angel with the moulting wings,' because she
was always in an ecstatic tremor over the second coming of the Messiah.
She would go to the housetop at least once every six months, and there,
with a band of pious deluded geese dressed in white flowing robes, would
inspect the firmament for favourable signs. Nothing ever happened, as we
know, yet the predictions sown about the borders of that strange-looking
chart have in a measure come true.

"There were the grimmest and most resounding quotations from the
Apocalypse. 'Babylon is fallen, is fallen!' hummed in my ears for many a
day. And the pale horse also haunted me. What would I have given to hear
the music of that 'voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and
as the voice of great thunder.' I mean the 'harpers harping with their
harps' the 'new song before the throne, before the four beasts and the
elders.' It is recorded that 'no man could learn that song but the
hundred and forty _and_ four thousand, which were redeemed from the
earth.' That is a goodly multitude. Let us hope we shall be of it.
Learned Sir Thomas Browne asked what songs the sirens sang. I prefer to
hear that wonderful 'harped' song.

"But I wander. The fault lies in that wondrous map of the world, with
its pictured hordes of Russians sweeping down upon Europe and America
like a plague of locusts, the wicked unbaptized Antichrist at the head
of them, waving a cross held in reversed fashion. Don't ask me the
meaning of this crazy symbolism. The sect to which my mother's friend
belonged--God bless her, for she was a dear weak-minded lady--must have
set great store by these signs. I admit that as a boy they scared me.
Sitting here now, after forty years, I can still see those cryptograms.
However, to my tale. About ten years ago I was in Paris, and in my
capacity as Monsignor I had to attend a significant gathering at the
embassy of the Russian ambassador