PREDICTIONS OF THE GOSPEL.

No one is a prophet in his own land. — Death and passion of Jesus. — Persecution of the apostles. — Impenitent cities. — Ruin of the Temple and of Jerusalem. — Curse upon the Pharisees. — My words shall not pass away. — The cornerstone. — Parable of the murderous vinedressers. — One single flock and one single shepherd. — Advent of Elijah. — Announcement of the Consoler. — Second advent of the Christ. — Precursory signs. — Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. — Last judgment. PRECURSORY SIGNS.

— You shall also hear of war and of rumors of war; take care not to be troubled, for it is necessary that these things come to pass; but it shall not yet be the end, for nation shall be seen to rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, famines, and earthquakes in divers places. All these things shall be only the beginning of sorrows. (Saint Matthew, chapter XXIV, vv. 6 to 8.)

— Then brother shall deliver up brother to be put to death; children shall rise up against their fathers and their mothers and shall cause them to die. You shall be hated by all people because of my name; but he who perseveres unto the end shall be saved. (Saint Mark, chapter XIII, vv. 12 and 13.)

— When you shall see that the abomination of desolation, which was foretold by the prophet Daniel, is in the holy place (let him who reads understand well what he reads), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let not him who is on the housetop come down to take anything from his house; and let not him who is in the field turn back to fetch his clothes. But woe to the women who shall be with child or nursing in those days. Pray to God that your flight may not take place during the winter, nor on a Sabbath day, for the affliction of that time shall be so great as has never been equaled from the beginning of the world until the present, and as shall never be again. And if those days were not shortened, no man would be saved; but those days shall be shortened for the sake of the elect. (Saint Matthew, chapter XXIV, vv. 15 to 22.)

— Immediately after those days of affliction, the Sun shall be darkened and the Moon shall cease to give its light; the stars shall fall from heaven and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

Then the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven, and all the peoples of the Earth shall be in weeping and in groaning, and they shall see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of heaven with great majesty.

He shall send his angels, who shall make heard the resounding voice of their trumpets and who shall gather his elect from the four corners of the world, from one extremity of heaven to the other.

Learn a comparison drawn from the fig tree. When its branches are already tender and put forth leaves, you know that the summer is near. In the same way, when you see all these things, know that the Son of Man is near, that he is, as it were, at the door.

I say to you, in truth, that this race shall not pass away without all these things being fulfilled. (Saint Matthew, chapter XXIV, vv. 29 to 34.)

And it shall come to pass at the advent of the Son of Man as it came to pass in the time of Noah; for, as in the last times before the flood, men ate and drank, married and gave their children in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark; and just as they did not know the moment of the flood until it came upon them and swept away all the people, so also shall it be at the advent of the Son of Man. (Saint Matthew, chapter XXIV, vv. 37 to 39.)

— As for that day and that hour, no one knows it, neither the angels who are in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Saint Mark, chapter XIII, v. 32.)

— In truth, in truth I say to you: you shall weep and groan, and the world shall rejoice; you shall be in sadness, but your sadness shall be changed into joy. A woman, when she gives birth, is in pain, because her hour is come; but after she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers all the ills she suffered, for the joy she experiences at having brought a man into the world. So it is that now you are in sadness; but I shall see you again and your heart shall rejoice, and no one shall snatch your joy from you. (Saint John, chapter XVI, vv. 20 to 22.)

— Many false prophets shall rise up who shall seduce many persons; and, because iniquity shall abound, the charity of many shall grow cold; but he who perseveres unto the end shall be saved. And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached throughout all the Earth, to serve as a testimony to all nations. And then the end shall come. (Saint Matthew, chapter XXIV, vv. 11 to 14.)

— This picture of the end of times is evidently allegorical, like the majority of those that Jesus composed.

By their vigor, the images it encloses are of a nature to impress intelligences still crude.

To touch strongly those imaginations little subtle, vigorous paintings, of strongly accentuated colors, were necessary.

Jesus addressed himself principally to the people, to the less enlightened men, incapable of understanding metaphysical abstractions and of grasping the delicacy of forms.

In order to reach the heart, it was needful for him to speak to the eyes, with the aid of material signs, and to the ears, by means of the force of language.

As a natural consequence of that disposition of mind, the supreme power, according to the belief of that time, could not manifest itself except by means of extraordinary, supernatural facts; the more impossible those facts were, the more easily accepted was their probability.

The Son of Man, coming upon clouds, with great majesty, surrounded by his angels and to the sound of trumpets, appeared to them of far greater imposingness than the simple coming of an entity invested only with moral power.

For that very reason, the Jews, who awaited in the Messiah an earthly king, more powerful than all other kings, destined to place their nation at the head of all the rest and to raise up again the throne of David and of Solomon, would not recognize him in the humble son of a carpenter, without material authority.

Nevertheless, that poor proletarian of Judea became the greatest among the great; he conquered for his sovereignty a greater number of kingdoms than the most powerful potentates; 10 exclusively by his word and the concurrence of a few wretched fishermen, he revolutionized the world, and it is to him that the Jews will come to owe their rehabilitation.

He spoke, then, a truth when, answering this question of Pilate: “Are you a king?” he answered: “You say it.”

— It is to be noted that, among the ancients, earthquakes and the darkening of the Sun were obligatory accessories of all events and of all sinister presages; we encounter them at the death of Jesus, at that of Caesar, and in a countless number of other circumstances of the history of paganism.

If such phenomena had occurred as often as they are related, it would be impossible that men should not have kept the memory of them through tradition.

Here is added the fall of the stars from heaven, as if to show to future generations, more enlightened, that there is in it nothing but a fiction, for it is now known that the stars cannot fall.

— Nevertheless, beneath these allegories great truths are hidden.

There is, first of all, the prediction of the calamities of every kind that shall desolate and decimate Humanity, calamities resulting from the supreme struggle between good and evil, between faith and incredulity, between progressive ideas and retrograde ideas.

There is, in the second place, that of the diffusion, throughout all the Earth, of the Gospel restored to its primitive purity; 4 then, that of the reign of good, which shall be that of universal peace and fraternity, deriving from the code of evangelical morality, put into practice by all peoples.

It shall truly be the reign of Jesus, for he shall preside over its establishment, men coming to live under the aegis of his law; 6 it shall be the reign of happiness, for he says that, “after the days of affliction shall come those of joy.”

— When shall such things come to pass? “No one knows it,” says Jesus, “not even the Son”; 2 but, when the moment comes, men shall be forewarned by means of precursory signs.

Those indications, however, shall be neither in the Sun nor in the stars; they shall show themselves in the social state and in phenomena more of a moral than of a physical order, and which, in part, may be deduced from his allusions.

It is indubitable that that change could not be operated during the lifetime of the apostles, for, otherwise, Jesus would not have been ignorant of its moment; moreover, such a transformation could not possibly take place within only a few years.

Yet he speaks of it to them as if they were to witness it; this is because, in effect, they will be able to be reincarnated when the transformation takes place and even to collaborate in its accomplishment.

He now speaks of the near fate of Jerusalem, now takes that fact as a point of reference for what would occur in the future.

— Could it be that, in predicting his second coming, it was the end of the world that Jesus announced, saying: When the Gospel shall be preached throughout all the Earth, then shall the end come?

It is not rational to suppose that God should destroy the world precisely when it enters upon the path of moral progress, through the practice of the evangelical teachings; nothing, moreover, in the words of the Christ indicates a universal destruction which, in such conditions, would not be justified.

The general practice of the Gospel having to determine a great improvement in the moral state of men, it, for that very reason, shall bring the reign of good and shall bring about the fall of evil.

It is, then, the end of the old world, of the world governed by prejudices, by pride, by egoism, by fanaticism, by incredulity, by cupidity, by all the sinful passions, that the Christ alluded to in saying: “When the Gospel shall be preached throughout all the Earth, then shall the end come”: 5 that end, however, in order to arrive, would occasion a struggle, and it is from that struggle that the ills foreseen by him shall come. [1] This expression, the abomination of desolation, not only lacks meaning, but lends itself to ridicule. The translation of Osterwald says: “The abomination that causes the desolation,” which is very different. The meaning then becomes perfectly clear, for one understands that abominations are to bring about desolation, as a chastisement. When the abomination, says Jesus, shall install itself in the holy place, desolation also shall come there, and this shall constitute a sign that the times are near.