Character of the People In the Last Half of the 20th Century Until Now
II Timothy 3: 1 Know also this, that in the last days shall come dangerous times. 2 Men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, 3 Without affection, without peace, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness, 4 Traitors, stubborn, puffed up, and lovers of pleasure more than of God: 5 Having an appearance indeed of godliness but denying the power thereof. Now these avoid. 6 For of these sort are they who creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sins, who are led away with divers desires: 7 Ever learning and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth. 8 Now as a Jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith. 9 But they shall proceed no farther: for their folly shall be manifest to all men, as theirs also was. I Timothy 4:1 Now the Spirit manifestly saith that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and doctrines of devils, 3. Forbidding to marry, to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful and by them that have known the truth. II Thessalonians 2:10 And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish: because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth but have consented to iniquity. The main characteristic of the people of these times is a lack of love for truth, which leaves them open for the operation of error, which brings them Antichrist. The singular mark of the last half a century has been deception, as Jesus foretold: For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. (Matthew 24:24)Thus the deceptiveness of this new creed lies in this, that its adherents rush to conclusions the premises of which rest on uncertainties, and it is not too much to say that they know this all the time, yet so enamored are thy of these conclusions that they will not practically acknowledge that they can be no more certain than the uncertainties on which they are built. Now, these are the men of all others in the world who exercise most efficiently the critical faculty, and who insist most strictly on the requirements of exact logic in everything else. See them when there is a question of the evidence of a miracle, or a revelation, or of a Divine messenger of a Church which claims to speak in the name of God! Put a faulty syllogism or an incomplete induction before them then, and mark their severity! But when the question is as to some physical theory which may cast a doubt on revelation, or Scripture, or the authority of conscience, of the spirituality or immortality of the soul, and then these false men of science are children. They will reject the evidences of the religion of Jesus Christ, severe as the argument may be, but they will have their own theories, hatched yesterday and perhaps to be discarded by themselves tomorrow, accepted at once as so certain that they may be reasoned from as accepted and prolific truths. And when this kind of credulity becomes the case with masses of men in their acceptance of such a system, is it unfair to say that this system is allowed, judicially, as St. Paul tells us, to have a power of deceptiveness which is without parallel in the history of human thought? And this is the same thing as to say of it that it may well enough be the creed of that last generation, on which, because it would not retain love of truth that is might be saved, God will send an operation of delusion, that is may believe lying. Fr. Coleridge gave this sermon on the creed of false science before 1883. (Discourses on the Latter Days from the sermons of Father Henry James Colieridge, S.J., 1883, pages 61-2)
