Advent and the Second Coming: Part IV

Normally talk of the Second Coming of Christ is relegated to the end of the Liturgical Year when the readings focus our attention on the End Times.  Yet Advent, when our attention is riveted on the First Coming of Christ, is a good time to think about its bookend, the Second Coming of Christ when the mission of the Church established by Christ is fulfilled.  Saint John Cardinal Newman possessed one of the keenest minds ever placed at the service of the Church.  He touched upon the Second Coming in more than a few of his sermons, and he will be our guide each Sunday on this topic as we wend our way to Christmas this Advent.

Cardinal Newman, before he converted, preached four Advent Sermons on the Anti-Christ.  Go here, here, here and here to read the sermons.  After his conversion Newman gave four lectures looking at what the Fathers of the Church had to say about the Anti-Christ.  At the end of his lectures he quotes a prediction of an Anglican Bishop at the end of the Eighteenth Century which reads like an analysis of our time:

THE above expositions of the teaching of the Fathers on the subject treated, were preached by the Author in the form of Sermons in Advent, 1835, and are illustrated by the following remarkable passage in a letter of Bishop Horsley’s, written before the beginning of this century; vide British Magazine, May, 1834.

“The Church of God on earth will be greatly reduced, as we may well imagine, in its apparent numbers, in the times of Antichrist, by the open desertion of the powers of the world. This desertion will begin in a professed indifference to any particular form of Christianity, under the pretence of universal toleration; which toleration will proceed from no true spirit of charity and forbearance, but from a design to undermine Christianity, by multiplying and encouraging sectaries. The pretended toleration will go far beyond a just toleration, even as it regards the different sects of Christians. For governments will pretend an indifference to all, and will give a protection in preference to none. All establishments will be laid aside. From the toleration of the most pestilent heresies, they will proceed to the toleration of Mahometanism, Atheism, and at last to a positive persecution of the truth of Christianity. In these times the Temple of God will be reduced almost to the Holy Place, that is, to the small number of real Christians who worship the Father in spirit and in truth, and regulate their doctrine and their worship, and their whole conduct, strictly by the word of God. The merely nominal Christians will all desert the profession of the truth, when the powers of the world desert it. And this tragical event I take to be typified by the order to St. John to measure the Temple and the Altar, and leave the outer court (national Churches) to be trodden under foot by the Gentiles. The property of the clergy will be pillaged, the public worship insulted and vilified by these deserters of the faith they once professed, who are not called apostates because they never were in earnest in their profession. Their profession was nothing more than a compliance with fashion and public authority. In principle they were always, what they now appear to be, Gentiles. When this general desertion of the faith takes place, then will commence the sackcloth ministry of the witnesses … There will be nothing of splendour in the external appearance of their churches; they will have no support from governments, no honours, no emoluments, no immunities, no authority, but that which no earthly power can take away, which they derived from Him, who commissioned them to be His witnesses.”—B. M., vol. v., p. 520.

Whether the Second Coming comes tomorrow, or a billion tomorrows from now, our duty is always to be spiritually prepared.  Not a bad message for Christians during Advent and the rest of each year.