As I mentioned in the previous (but one) post, I've been wanting to re-read Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, which I first read almost exactly eleven years ago. Since it concerns the Antichrist and the end of the world, the subject matter seems even more timely now than it did then. I wrote about it at the time--click here to read that post--and for the most part what I said there still applies after this reading. But I enjoyed it much more, and think it's a better book, this time.

Some part of this upgrade, so to speak, may be due to the fact that I read an actual printed book this time, the nicely printed and bound one from Cluny Media, rather than a Kindle version. I just don't much like reading anything more than a couple of thousand words on an electronic device. And some part may be due to my having given it more attention this time. Whatever the reason, I found it more involving on every level than I did before. I didn't find the lack of narrative drama that I complained about before, and I found myself more involved with the characters than before. In particular the story of one character, Mabel Brand, wife of a major political leader, is quite moving. I can't say much more about that without giving too much away. It's still not a great work from the literary point of view, but it's a good one, a better one than I thought on first reading.

I still find--I'll try to keep this vague--that some parts of the actual spiritual and physical collision of Christ and Antichrist are vaguely depicted, which is not a surprising flaw in such an attempt. And the extent to which Benson imagines the 21st century Catholic Church to be more or less the same as it was in his time remains a striking feature--not necessarily a defect, just strikingly not what has actually happened. Which is true of most of his imagined 20th century history. And almost ludicrously, he envisions the establishment of a new compulsory secular worship as requiring the assistance of an apostate priest who designs ceremonies as elaborate and minutely choreographed as a High Mass in the Vatican in Benson's time. If that is to be the way things go at the actual end, it must be a long way off yet. (The apostate priest, by the way, is named Francis, which amused me.)

The story, as I mentioned, is also more timely, which makes it more interesting. The idea of a compulsory secular worship is not as far-fetched as it was only eleven years ago, with corporations and governments and universities making life difficult for anyone who does not actively join in the celebration of "Pride" (!).  And moves by the federal government in the past few years to put some Christians under surveillance as potential terrorists make the persecution described in the book much more easily imagined. 

Note: I feel obliged to say that I don't think the word "persecution" is accurate as applied to Christians in this country right now. We may see the potential for it, but it isn't here now, and to claim that it is here is the mistake we refer to as "crying wolf." 

And, just for the record, I do believe--in fact I think it's obvious, in fact I think it would be difficult and foolish to deny--that the spirit of Antichrist is very much active in Western culture right now. Whether this means we actually might be near the end of the world is not a question on which I have anything like a definite opinion--not for public expression, and not even in my own mind. 

NOTE: the Cluny edition is a hardback and thus on the expensive side. But as of this writing it and many other titles are going for 20% off, which makes this one $26.36 vs. $32.95. I don't know how long this will be the case. You'll see the discount applied in your cart before you check out.

UPDATE: THE SALE IS OVER NOW.