Garcon!" As we smoked
our panatelas he related this history:--
"You ask me if I believe in an Antichrist, thereby betraying your
slender knowledge of the Scriptures--you will pardon the liberty! I may
refer you not only to John's Epistles, to the revelations of the
dreamer of Patmos, but to so many learned doctors of the faith that it
would take a week merely to enumerate the titles of their works all
bearing on the mysterious subject. Our Holy Mother the Church has held
aloof from any doctrinal pronouncements. The Antichrist has been
predicted for the past thousand years. I recall as a boy poring over the
map of the world which a friend of my mother had left with her. This
lady my father called 'the angel with the moulting wings,' because she
was always in an ecstatic tremor over the second coming of the Messiah.
She would go to the housetop at least once every six months, and there,
with a band of pious deluded geese dressed in white flowing robes, would
inspect the firmament for favourable signs. Nothing ever happened, as we
know, yet the predictions sown about the borders of that strange-looking
chart have in a measure come true.
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