Page:Mahometanism in its relation to prophecy - or, an inquiry into the prophecies concerning antichrist, with some reference to their bearing on the events of the present day (IA mahometanisminit00philrich).pdf/270

 the angelical Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas had fashioned it, embraced the Epicurean and other false systems of heathen antiquity. Along with this new development of heathen philosophy, there arose a simultaneous desire to revive the expression of the heathen mind in art and architecture, and in literature. The result of this was more and more to sever men's minds from the influence of Catholicism and the Gospel, and so to make them an easier prey to the arguments of rationalism and infidelity, while it tended immensely to the development of immorality and impurity in its worst forms. All this came to a culminating point in the great French Revolution, which, on a smaller scale, has been enacted in almost every other country; and although good men from time to time have been raised up by God to stem the torrent, or, if possible, to infuse a Christian element into it, it has been continually spreading its noxious influence, till at length we behold the universe involved in it, and all men, who look seriously at what is going on, are persuaded that humanity is hurrying on to the most tremendous cataclysm that history has ever witnessed.

This cataclysm is what we understand by the destruction of the mystic Babylon of the Apocalypse, and it will issue in the final triumph