The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days

Father Coleridge writes: “IT must often strike you, my brethren in our Lord, as you study the writings of St. Paul and the other Apostles, how much we owe to the occasional, and as it seems to us, to the accidental character of the questions or difficulties which were put to them, or with which they had to deal. These Thessalonian Christians, who had not been very long admitted to the privileges of the Church, happened, as we should say, to have misunderstood some words of the Apostle, or of some other Christian teacher, con, cerning the end of all things for which they were told to be always ready, to which they were bidden always to look forward. In consequence of Their mistake the blessed st. Paul had to write to them a second Epistle, mainly with the object of setting them right on the subject of the time of the approach of the end of the world.” Coleridges comments on the Gospel: “But yet the Son of Man when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?”: “THESE words of sad foreboding were uttered by our Blessed Lord when He had been exhorting His disciples never to faint or grow weary in prayer. He told them how the unjust judge had avenged the poor widow's wrong, simply because, in her importunity, she gave him no peace till he did so. He feared not God, and did not regard man, yet he was forced by her continual prayer to do justice. "Hear what the unjust judge saith; and will not God avenge His elect, who cry to Him day and night, and will He have patience in their regard? I say to you that He will quickly revenge them. But yet the Son of Man when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth? " His Elect will cry to Him day and night, and He will certainly come quickly to avenge them. The persecution of Antichrist will be very severe, and his seductions very powerful, so as to lead astray, if it were possible, even the Elect. But, by the mercy of God, it is not possible. About this same time He said to the Jews, " My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me, and I give them life everlasting; and they shall not perish for ever, and no man shall pluck them out of My hand. No man can snatch them out of the hand of My Father." In these prophetic times, these sermons are even more importan than when they were first preached in the 1880's.