Lord Of The World

by Robert Hugh Benson

Overview

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's dystopian science fiction book, ''Lord of the World'' published in 1907, centers on Antichrist's rule and the end of the world. Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pearce, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis have all referred to it as prophetic. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, a former High Church Anglican Vicar who converted to Catholicism in 1903, started writing Lord of the World two years later, sending the Church of England into shock. Robert Benson came from a very long line of Anglican ministers and was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mary Sidgwick Benson, a social hostess. It was widely thought that he would one day succeed his father as the most senior cleric in the Anglican Communion because he had also read the litany at his father's death in Canterbury Cathedral in 1896. Benson, however, was accepted into the Catholic Church on September 11, 1903, following a spiritual crisis detailed in his 1913 memoir Confessions of a Convert. The news that the son of the former Archbishop of Canterbury had converted to Catholicism was widely covered by the media, and the Anglican establishment was also shaken by the revelation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789357273725
Publisher:	Double 9 Books
Publication date:	12/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	755 KB

Read an Excerpt

BOOK III—THE VICTORY CHAPTER I The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of simplicity. Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and its floor beaten mud. A square table stood in the centre, with a chair beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes. There were three doors, one leading to the private oratory, one to the anteroom, and the third to the little paved court. The south windows were shuttered, but through the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot Eastern day outside. It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything of the cicade from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep silence. The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading. For the while, all was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility. The book He held was a cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a month before, and He was now drawing to an end. It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself. More, however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh's consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to his society—that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West and East. From certain indications in the book it had been argued that its actual writer was a Westerner. The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather withthose two or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American politics and his m...

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
Preface to the original edition     xi
Prologue     1
The Advent     15
The Encounter     101
The Victory     245