Hell’s Amazing Grace

By author Solange Hertz, from her book, Beyond Politics (Amazon.com)

To describe the workings of God’s grace in souls, St. Teresa of Avila was fond of using the analogy of water. In The Interior Castle she tells us: I cannot find anything more appropriate than water to explain spiritual things. Since I know little, and my imagination does not help me, and I am very fond of this element, I have considered it more attentively than other things. Everything that a God so great and so wise has created must have very many secrets from which we may learn, and those who know some of them do so.

Still, I believe that there are more than anyone can understand in every little thing that God has made, even though it be but an ant. Although so commonplace it flows into every kitchen sink, hardly any natural substance is so mysterious as water, over which “the spirit of God moved” even before light was made, when “the earth was void and empty.” Without water was nothing created. As the vivifying river which “went out of the place of pleasure to water paradise” (Gen.l: 2-3; 2:10), water branched out to fructify the whole earth, not only naturally but supernaturally. Consecrated by the Baptism of the Incarnate Word in the Jordan and gushing from our Lord’s Sacred Heart after His death on the Cross, water became God’s preferred means for imparting divine life to souls. Doomed to ape God if he would be like Him, Lucifer had to choose some similar natural element for conveying death to them. +

At La Salette our Lady predicted, “There will be extraordinary wonders every place because the true faith has been extinguished, and false light illumines the world.” This false light, source of latter day wonders, can be easily traced to Lucifer, whose very name means “Light-bearer,” and whose vocation from the beginning was to enlighten and energize creation from the heights of heaven. Whereas God redeems mankind by means of water in the sacrament of Baptism, it now appears that the fallen angel intends to engineer its damnation by means of electricity.

This mighty force, pulled from the void by the divine words, “Be light made” after water already existed, would serve as Lucifer’s anti-grace. Pervading the universe before the sun was created on the fourth day, electromagnetism cannot be evil in itself, for Scripture tells us “God saw the light that it was good,” but as Prince of this world, Lucifer was apparently at liberty to appropriate it to his own purposes. Many an aged citizen today can look back on a youth spent without electricity. For thousands of years generations have lived happily without it, relying on simple mechanics and water power to provide their creature comforts, when suddenly, with the onslaught of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, it became a necessity. Without electricity, civilized existence was deemed no longer possible. To civilize meant to electrify. If water still figures as a major power source, that is because it can be used to produce current. Usurping the role of the Holy Ghost as paraclete and consoler, electricity is the very soul of the city of man, indispensable elixir of progress. Via mechanical “pace-makers” installed by electricians in surgical robes, it would even take up its rest in human hearts.

Battening on the sins of men, Lucifer at long last finds himself in a position to bring to fruition what he failed to do at Babel, where men were persuaded for the first time to opt for the artificial. “Let us make brick, and bake them with fire,” they decided, determined to improve on the natural wood and stone God provided them as building materials. In our day, with the help of electric power, these are being replaced by plastics of every conceivable variety, from rooftops to shoes and clothing made from artificial leathers and fibers. Foods are becoming processed chemicals. Planning to transform God’s creation into one of his own devising, Lucifer intends to overlook no detail. Modern society’s dependence on the new energy exceeds that of any addictive drug. Whole cultures have been put at the mercy of whoever controls the current.

First entangled in wires, then in magnetic fields, mankind is driven ever farther from reality. Progressively losing contact with God’s natural world, it is surrendering the last traces of the divine image in which it was created to take on the configuration of Satan ‘s. The hapless citizen cut off from the anti-grace becomes a pariah, automatically excommunicated from common life, where the humblest tasks cannot be performed without it. Unless equipped with calculators, schoolchildren can no longer manage simple sums. Homes and offices, farms and factories, banks and schools, hospitals and laboratories all operate on its power. International corporations, communication and transportation systems alike require its services to function.

All the while supplying the bulk of popular entertainment, electricity runs the government and records every financial transaction. Even aircraft are flown by computers. The child in the womb is not safe from its depredations. Unprecedented material progress of this kind within the space of two hundred years argues for exceptional knowledge of the secrets of nature . The dream of the men of Babel to reach heaven by physical means, which they hoped to do by constructing a tower “the top whereof may reach to heaven” (Gen. 11:4), has been revived by the limitless possibilities of space travel. Infected by Lucifer’s own desire to rise above his assigned place, man now joins him not only in flying above the ground, but those higher regions above the earth which the Fathers of the Church tell us became the preferred habitat of the fallen angels after their expulsion from heaven. What better proof of the quasi-irreversibility of the Great Apostasy now in progress?

Advancing roughshod as it has over the ruins of Christendom in proportion to the decline of the Faith, it can only have been gleaned from preternatural sources, for never could it claim Christian inspiration. Few modern scientists of any stature have been practicing Catholics – who even now cling desperately to their flickering tapers and candles and try to dissuade their children from discharging their Sunday obligations by viewing Mass on television. Nuclear energy may appear to have conferred many benefits, but its firstborn was the death-dealing atom bomb. The sinister direction the electronic age would take should have been clear as soon as the electric chair began replacing the gibbet and malefactors were electrocuted rather than hanged.

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A sure guide in eschatological matters is the Mother of God, who elucidated the mighty Apocalypse of St. John with a little one of her own, commonly referred to as the Secret of La Salette. She indicated the demonic inspiration of the Electronic Age when she told the young Mélanie on September 19, 1846 that it is “because the true faith has been extinguished and false light illumines the world.” that “there will be extraordinary wonders everywhere.” In other words, these wonders will be more in the nature of punishments than benefits. The false light of which she speaks may have been no metaphor, for the very next year would see the birth of Thomas A. Edison, and in 1856, two years before the Secret was to have been made public, the electronic genius Nikola Tesla was born.

From the laboratories of these two wizards a stream of wonders unparalleled began pouring which not only suffers no decline, but ever gains momentum. Where the former inventor domesticated electricity by ruthlessly trapping it in batteries and wires so as to set an electric bill at its point of exit to the consumer, the latter would harness Niagara Falls and show how electricity need only be picked out of the air to do its master’s bidding. He would develop the principles which put high frequency currents, fluorescent lighting, radar, wireless remote control, telautomatics, computers, robotry, weather control, diathermy and very likely the UFO at the service of the world. Predicting the triumph of electromagnetism, Tesla wrote,

“We shall have no need to transmit power at all. Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. … It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of the universe.”[26]

In so supercharged an atmosphere, it may be of some significance that Catholic tradition singles out “lightnings” as the special servants and harbingers of the Antichrist. In a famous sermon on the last days, St. Ephraim the Deacon says they … will give a sign of his coming. Demons will be his forces; the princes of the demons his disciples. He will send the leaders of his forces into far distant regions, and will give them power and healing, and they will seduce the whole world. Sons will deny their fathers and follow the Evil One. Priests will leave their altars, and going forth become his heralds. Edison’s contemporary, the Masonic Grand Commander and Luciferian highpriest Albert Pike, spoke of electricity as: ” … a universal agent, whose supreme law is equilibrium; and whereby, if science can but learn to control it, it will be possible to change the order of the seasons, to produce in night the phenomena of day, to send a thought in an instant round the world, to heal or slay at a distance, to give our words universal success, and to make them reverberate everywhere.”[27]

Nearly all of this has come to pass, with whole populations now hanging on the electronic word. Not only have the seasons been changed as Pike predicted, whether by actual weather control or by artificial heating and cooling, but time itself, that hitherto inviolable component of matter, seems to have been subtly tampered with. With night turned into day by electricity, the natural rhythms of alternating darkness and light, with all the God-given regularity and order dependent on them, are profoundly disrupted. There is no rank of society which does not suffer from pathological arrhythmia.

Poetry staggers and misses its beat, for men no longer set their pace to the music of the spheres. There is no peace. According to St. Peter Chrysologos: The sequence of day and night is so ordered that labor follows rest and rest comes after labor. Hence also the sun and moon each in turn encompasses the limits of the world, so that the sun with its recurring light may give a greater brightness to the day and the moon with its pale light may not leave the night in total darkness. Hence too the stars in their courses vary in their hour of rising, to mark the time by night and guide the traveler. Hence the seasons that come and go, and begin again to be as they are about to end. Hence seeds put forth, bud, mature, grow old, fade, die and are buried again in the life-giving furrow.

In this life God intended man to be swaddled in reassuring, recurring natural rhythms, much as the unborn child floats in the womb-fluid of its mother. Now he eats, works and plays around the digital clock with no curb to his activity but exhaustion. He is driven to near frenzy by an illusion of accelerated time, whose most baleful effect is not so much shattered nerves and deadened wills as the near total destruction of prayer and the recollection of God and divine truths.

“In the year 1864,” our Lady told Mélanie, “Lucifer together with a great number of devils, will be loosed from hell. Little by little, they will abolish the Faith.” With the very chickens laying eggs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, even Holy Mass adheres to no schedule. Long superseded are the strictures laid down by Pope St. Pius V against celebrating the Holy Sacrifice after sundown, for liturgy must keep step with the times or leave the parade. In the United States, holy days occurring on Friday, Saturday or Monday are no longer of obligation. There is even talk of arbitrarily fixing the date of Easter, which from earliest times has been allowed to coincide with the full moon of the Spring Equinox which illumined our Lord’s Passion and death. A change which in the opinion of some, could have been proposed only by city-dwellers who never see the moon anyhow, blotted out as it is by neon signs!

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The use of electromagnetic power may therefore be expected to rise and fall with satanic influence over human affairs. Pervading the fabric of the universe as it does, it was probably first harnessed in Adamic times, until “the wickedness of men was great on the earth, and … all the thought of their heart was bent upon evil at all times” (Gen. 6:5). Making use of His favorite element, God let fall the torrential waters still pent up in the firmament above, and mercifully destroyed the lot of them in the Flood. Scripture does not say whether there was any sizzling. For centuries thereafter, electricity’s secrets probably survived as part of the black arts preserved for posterity by Noah’s evil son Cham. The engineers of Babel were very likely acquainted with them, as may have been those who produced the wonders of Atlantis, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat and other extinct Chamite cultures originating in antediluvian Egypt.

Electric power of some kind may have been used to build the pyramids, whose purpose and mode of construction still defy explanation. With the advent of Christianity, the mysteries of electricity remained the heritage of alchemists and occultists. That their experiments had to be performed in secret should be sufficient testimony to their incompatibility with the faith. Grand Commander Pike acknowledged that the “jargon of alchemy,” used to “deceive the vulgar herd,” masked a deeper purpose. If the arcane knowledge of the sanctuaries of Egypt was not made public, says he, it was “because to do so it would have been necessary to reveal one of the great Secrets of the Temple, that double law of attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy, of fixedness and movement, which is the principle of Creation, and the perpetual cause of life.”

In other words, the public would have had to be told about electricity, whose premature disclosure might dangerously jeopardize the Luciferian cause in its beginnings. Until some degree of political emancipation was assured, such knowledge was prudently restricted to trusted adepts.

That modern inventions are at the disposal of an occult elite long before they are made available to the world at large was the contention of the occult researcher Dr. Bataille, author of Le Diable au XIXiéme Siècle. Telling, for instance, of a wireless telephone used by Masonic masters for rapid communication long before Marconi was credited with the invention of telegraphy, he writes, “In his house Gallatin Mackey once showed me that Arcula Mystica of which there are only seven examples, at Charleston, Rome, Berlin, Washington, Monte Video, Naples and Calcutta.” By such means would the Great Work be brought to perfection, whose supreme goal was the total regeneration of society by scientific means.

Meanwhile, ascribing the creation of life to electricity perdures as an article of the luciferian creed. Those who persist in trying to prove the absurd theory of evolution without a shred of concrete evidence do not scruple to divinize electricity, contending that life began when a flash of primordial lightning struck by chance some particularly well-disposed molecules and produced amino acids! Slaying or bringing to life by its energy, what Pike called “the principle of creation and perpetual cause of life” is already producing the false miracles of the Antichrist, making the deaf to hear and the lame to walk through electronic hearing aids and prosthetics of every kind.

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The stage was cleared for the electronic age when Galileo thumbed his nose at Scripture and set the sun to blazing at the center of the universe as almighty life-giving agent. Queen Elizabeth’s personal physician William Gilbert, a near contemporary of Galileo, had already plotted science’s future in his monumental work De Magnete on “the Great Magnet of the Earth,” which, together with his posthumous New Philosophy of our Sublunar World, made him the most distinguished scientist of his day. Holding the same views as Galileo and Copernicus on the position of the earth, Gilbert believed magnetism to be the force which kept celestial bodies in orbit, coining the terms electrical attraction and magnetic pole to explain his theories. Once it acquired a degree of respectability, electricity bolted, so to speak, out of the alchemists’ laboratories and offered its services on the outside to the world at large. With the separation of Church and science by that time an accomplished fact, all that remained before action could begin was for Isaac Newton to “discover” the “laws” of universal attraction by which the newly re-constituted universe could operate on its own without the help of God’s angels. Before he was twenty-six years old he had worked out the new celestial legislation, which would be published in 1687 as the renowned Principia. Physics was born.

Authorized to pontificate independently of God’s word, it was constituted sole official interpreter of the data of physical nature, assuming a role very similar to the one psychiatry would play in interpreting the data of spiritual nature. This untoward leap of human intelligence to unbounded autonomy was greeted with such wild enthusiasm in the halls of academia that Alexander Pope was moved to deliver his famous quip, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light!” and there was no going back after that. That the first sparks were seen just as the First Beast of the Apocalypse appeared on the historical horizon can hardly have been coincidental. It was only fitting that Lucifer, the primordial “light-bearer,” would launch the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century from America, cradle of democracy and cenacle of his revolutionary New Order of the Ages.

Fitting also that the blazing torch brandished in the right hand of that nation’s certified idol, the Statue of Liberty, should be powered by electricity (thirteen 1,000-watt lamps all told) as she keeps her faithful eastward watch over sunken Atlantis. Exalted Illuminata of the last days, this “mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,” – to borrow the words of Emma Lazarus’ poem adorning the pedestal- owes her lightning only secondarily to Edison and Tesla, both of whom labored on American soil nearby on South Fifth Avenue in New York City. Actually she owes her lightning to their illustrious predecessor Benjamin Franklin, dean of the American Founding Fathers. Hailed on continents as the new Prometheus for his experiments with electricity and his invention of the lightning-rod, Franklin was compared to the gnostic hero of classical antiquity who liberated man from divine tyranny by putting into his hands fire stolen from heaven. As his French admirer Robert Turgot would put it, “Eripuit caelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis!” He snatched fire from heaven and the scepter from tyrants. In Franklin’s presence the rebels Prometheus and Liberty plighted their troth, and they have never wavered in their fidelity to each other. Not far from Liberty’s statue in New York harbor stands an 18-foot gilded bronze image of Prometheus, the Spirit of Electricity himself, dominating Rockefeller Center Plaza opposite St. Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral. Working in close cooperation, electricity and revolution have made Christendom their thrall and are now preparing to indenture it to the Antichrist. Thus it was that St. John saw the Second Beast of the Apocalypse, figure of the new secular scientific Church, doing “great signs, so that he made fire to come down from heaven unto the earth in the sight of men. And he seduced them that dwell on the earth.” By means of this mysterious fire, men would be subjected to a totalitarian dictatorship beyond anything the world has ever seen: “And he shall make all, both little and great, freemen and bondsmen, to have a character in their right hand or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Apo. 13:13-14; 16-17). God had foreseen at Babel that men would not “leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed” (Gen. 11:1-6), and this time He would not intervene as heretofore, but would let evil run its course. Our Lady told Mélanie, God will abandon men to themselves and will send chastisements one after the other. Nature begs vengeance on account of men, and she shudders with dread, awaiting what must happen to the crime-stained earth. The seasons will be changed, the earth will produce bad fruits, the heavenly bodies will lose the regularity of their movements … You must expect to be governed by a rod of iron. … The spirits of darkness will everywhere spread universal relaxation in everything concerning God’s service; there will be churches to serve these spirits. People will be transported from one place to another by these evil spirits. The Mother of God does not speak of automobiles, trains, jets or space craft. She says that transportation will be provided by evil spirits, because these are the true promoters of godless technology, whereas human manufacturers are merely hired agents. “The demons of the air, together with the Antichrist, will work great wonders on the earth and in the air, and men will become ever more perverted,” for technocracy is truly a perversion, an occupational hazard to which man’s God-given dominion over natural creation renders him congenitally susceptible. Paula Haigh writes: Visit any country in the world today and one finds society dominated by technology and an evolutionary ideology of progress directing all areas of life. It’s called the ‘technological mandate.’ Whence comes such a mandate, such forced searchings into all the secrets of nature with no moral restraints whatsoever and no guidelines other than the will of godless scientists themselves? It comes from the Luciferian ideology that is ultimately lawless and insists that we ‘change or die!’ Offer incense to the modern God-Science or die! Because love of God and love of man are substantially one, a science divorced from God ends by severing relations with humanity. Under cover of service to others, the consummate and methodical cruelty of which lawless science is capable went undetected for a long time. Confining its research at first to the dissection of human corpses and the vivisection of hapless animals in pathology laboratories, only fairly recently has it begun using human “fetuses” and organs from living donors in its rites. Blinded by the avalanche of benefits which accompanied modern science in its beginnings, only the most clairvoyant suspected its latent sadism in its beginnings. With the onset of that satanic triumph so aptly called the Industrial Revolution, the sharp artist’s eye of Joseph Wright of Derby, a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin’s, was one of the first to catch a prophetic glimpse of what science had in store, which he transferred to a large canvas now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. Entitled “Experiment with an Air Pump,” this masterpiece depicts a well-to-do English family gathered in their drawing room to watch an amateur scientist demonstrate how a vacuum may be created by pumping the air from a glass globe. Unfortunately his proof entails the death by suffocation of the children’s pet, a beautiful white cockatoo which has been taken from its cage and placed in the globe. The wonder about to take place is being patiently explained to one of the little girls, who is sobbing and too distraught to look. The man at the pump, clad in a dressing gown and exhibiting the dedicated objectivity of a warlock, is so intent on the proceedings as to have lost all contact with his surroundings, equally oblivious to the sufferings of the sensitive spectators and those of the unfortunate cockatoo. The painting’s effect is heightened by an eerie moon glimpsed through the adjoining window. Clearly intended is a reference to the Lunar Society, a scientific group whose members Wright knew well, and which included not only Franklin and his friend Joseph Priestley, but Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Thomas Jefferson’s former mathematics professor at William and Mary. The horrors perpetrated in the name of science, symbolized in the picture by the moon and a white cockatoo, are now pursued routinely in schools and laboratories where frogs and other small creatures are dissected as part of the curriculum. “Let the Pope beware of miracle workers, for the time has come for the most astonishing wonders to take place.” Lacking God’s supernatural cooperation, diabolic wonders cannot be genuine miracles, but only marvels in the natural order. Not that they are intended to carry religious significance, for their purpose is quite contrary. Allegedly produced entirely by men using natural means only, they will proclaim themselves as scientific in the most rigid sense of the word, for they are meant to prove that there is no such thing as a miracle in the supernatural sense. Where one appears to exist, it is merely a question of not comprehending the forces which caused it. Above all, their purpose is to persuade the witnesses that they have outgrown their childish need for God, inasmuch as miracles can be turned out in any variety or profusion desired without divine intervention. There is no need to speculate about the signs and wonders the Antichrist will display before future generations, for science is already performing them, not only in industry, but in the field of biogenetics. St. Nilus, an imperial official in Constantinople who became a hermit on Mt. Sinai, was already predicting in the fifth century that the Antichrist, in his desire to rule the universe, would … “produce miracles and fantastic signs. He will also give depraved wisdom to an unfortunate man so that he will discover a way by which one man can carry on a conversation with another from one end of the earth to the other. “At that time men will also fly through the air like birds and descend to the bottom of the sea like fish. And when they have achieved all this, these unhappy people will spend their lives in comfort without knowing, poor souls, that it is the deceit of the Antichrist. “And that impious one will so fill science with vanity that it will go off the right path and lead people to lose faith in the existence of the trinitarian God. Falling from the faith manifests itself only rarely in dramatic denials.” In the authoritative Tridentine Vulgate, the Latin word used for apostasy is simply discessio, a rather inoffensive one connoting a “slipping away” rather than any abrupt, clamorous departure. For Cicero it mostly meant changing one’s vote, an apt description of the kind of apostasy taking place everywhere around us. About as sensational as shifting one’s political allegiance, separation from the Faith is little more than opting for the more tangible inducements offered by the opposing candidate – who in this case, of course, happens to be the devil. To do his will one need only do one’s own. In the long run, electronic entertainments may render widespread persecutions unnecessary, for our Lady predicted, “The people will think only of amusing themselves.” + Beholding in his apocalyptic vision a trinity of “three unclean spirits like frogs” leaping from the mouths of the dragon and his beasts, St. John was told, “They are the spirits of devils working signs, and they go forth unto the kings of the earth, to gather them to battle against the great day of the Almighty God” (Apo. 16:13). At La Salette our Lady spoke in the same breath of “materialism, atheism, spiritism,” as if all three were pretty much the same thing. Although materialism and spiritism might appear to be mutually exclusive, they are in fact one with atheism. All three leaping frogs share natural affinities springing from a common satanic source, and warfare against God is their common purpose. Albert Pike knew whereof he spoke when he wrote: At the bottom of magic … was science! It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge. The Priests of Egypt knew, better than we do, the laws of movement and life. They knew how to temper or intensify action by reaction; and readily foresaw the realization of these effects, the causes of which they had determined. It was his contention that: … the dunces who led Christianity astray, by substituting faith for science, reverie for experience, the fantastic for reality, and the Inquisitors who for so many ages waged against Magism a war of extermination, have succeeded in shrouding in darkness the ancient discoveries of the human mind; so that we now grope in the dark to find again the key of the phenomena of nature. Paracelsus, the great Reformer in medicine, discovered magnetism long before Mesmer, and pushed to its last consequences this luminous discovery, or rather this initiation into the magic of the ancients, who understood the grand magical agent better than we do. Flunkey to materialism and atheism, electricity puts its mystical properties at the service of spiritism as well. The following passage from the Theosophist Alice Bailey’s Initiation Human and Solar, written in 1922, will prove that Lucifer is a master electrician who wields his medium with verve. She describes a ceremony where … the Hierophant utters the word, and the force is literally thrown into the initiates’ bodies and centers, passing down through the centers on the mental plane, via the astral centers, to the centers on etheric levels, which finally absorb it. This is the stupendous moment for the initiate, and brings to him a realization of the literal absolute truth of the phrase that ‘God is a consuming fire.’ He knows past all gainsaying that fiery energy and electric force constitute the sum-total of all that is. He is literally bathed in the fires of purification; he sees fire on all sides, etc. etc. More elaborate ceremonies are available, like Die Electrischen Vorspiele performed by German satanists of the school of Wilhelm Reich, who use stroboscopic effects, electrostatic generators and electric organs to excite the devotion and praise locked in the human subconscious. To a lesser degree almost anyone may now subject himself to similar techniques by way of movies, television, rock music or light shows. Long before Aldous Huxley predicted the “feelies” in Brave New World, such delectations were foretold by the Marquis Henri Gougenot des Mousseaux, a well-known nineteenth century Catholic writer who conferred with the young Maximin of La Salette. Knighted by Pope Pius IX for his prodigious work on Judaism and occult subjects, the Marquis died under extremely mysterious circumstances, from a poisoned host received at the private Mass he attended daily. Among his works is a volume entitled Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons, published in 1854 and now virtually unobtainable. In the course of speculating on the advent of the Antichrist he asks therein, must we not expect: … the course of [true] miracles to be arrested, suspended? And on the other hand, will not the superhuman, natural power of the devils to perform prodigies blaze out in its most sinister splendor? At the time of the final persecution, in order to punish the faithlessness of the cowardly and prove the faith of the strong, will not God have all miracles to cease on the part of Christ, all divine intervention to be suspended until the time for His breath to destroy the man of sin? Such proved to be the case when our Savior prepared to enter upon His Passion, for after the restoration of Malchus’ severed ear, there were no more miracles recorded of Him until the Resurrection. He told His disciples, “I will not now speak many things with you. For the prince of this world cometh, and in me he hath not any thing” (John 14:30). As the Church prepares to enter upon her own Passion in conformity with her divine Lord, should we not expect a similar situation? Des Mousseaux sensed the near approach of the man of sin even in his day, in the fact that: The free exchange of thought which Babel had interrupted and which would prepare for union of thought, seems to be with us, foreshadowing free exchange of all the goods of the earth, a principle before which the modern economist driven by the adventurous spirit of trade would like to see all frontiers and nationalities obliterated. For already patriotism is mere narrowness of mind and heart to the true liberal progressives adorned with the title of cosmopolites, those future tyrants of opinion! You will hear them decree to their heart’s content that humanity alone is the great Divinity on whose altar must be immolated any people, any man so unfortunate as to shackle the universal march of progress by insisting on their rights and interests. Des Mousseaux had come to the conclusion that telegraphy was: … the dawn of those terrifying wonders, progressive wonders soon to be compounded by human science and spiritism. More powerful and astonishing than the Simon Magus called by the Samaritans, even in the Apostles’ lifetime, ‘the great power of God’ (Acts 8:10), the final Antichrist will dazzle the people of the earth by the prodigious grandeur of his signs. Alas, how will men already largely seduced, already fascinated and separated from the Church be able to distinguish these prodigies from truly great miracles? See him now, this marvelous magician, walking like the Savior on the waters, flying through the air and gloriously surrounded by those false angels of light whose ephemeral, cursed splendor dazzles and captures the crowds. Here he is before us, speaking I know not what language whereby the Spirit of holiness seems to be lending its breath to the breath of him the world has called the Spirit of the Day or the Spirit of Progress! His hand touches and cures the sick; it restores movement to paralytics; and the beneficent power of his voice seems to recall the dead to life. Who is he, this incomprehensible man? Oh, if you ask him who he is, he will tell you simply: I am not an ordinary man, but, blind that you are, can’t you see? I am the son of God. I am, in other words, the perfect man, that is to say, man manifesting at last the divinity which until now idiots saw elsewhere! Nikola Tesla contemplated the prospect from an entirely different angle, but what he saw came to the same thing in the end. In an unpublished article entitled “Man’s Greatest Achievement,” which his one time associate John O’Neill included in his biography Prodigal Genius, Tesla left us some of his private speculations on man’s forthcoming control over nature. He wondered, “Can he harness all her inexhaustible energies to perform all their functions at his bidding, more still, cause them to operate simply by the force of his will? If he could do this he would have powers almost unlimited and supernatural.” We might mention here that Tesla, a materialist who professed no faith whatever in what is called a personal God, was the son of a cultured Serbian Orthodox priest, so his use of the word supernatural should be taken at its proper value. Without going into the subject of the Bermuda Triangle, UFO’s and the little green humanoids or the alleged experiment in invisibility successfully conducted at the Philadelphia Navy Yard shortly before the breakthrough on the atom bomb, perhaps the time has come to ask, “Was electromagnetism, revealed and developed by occult forces after the dawn of the Enlightenment, intended to forge a link between our natural world and the preternatural one of the fallen angels?” The preternatural is in no sense supernatural. Part and parcel of God’s natural creation, it is “preter” only because it lies above and beyond human nature. Disregarding entirely the supernatural, with which neither the natural nor the preternatural can establish contact without the help of God, is electromagnetism being used to set up, or pretend to set up a kind of permanent reciprocity between mankind and the powers of hell? Could this have been what Tesla was hinting at when he spoke of man’s future powers being “almost supernatural?” In the article he continued by saying: At his command, with but a slight effort on his part, old worlds would disappear and new ones of his planning would spring into being. He could fix, solidify and preserve the ethereal shapes of his imagining, the fleeting visions of his dreams. He could express all the creations of his mind on any scale, in forms concrete and imperishable. He could alter the size of this planet (!), control its seasons, guide it along any path he might choose through the depths of the universe. He could cause planets to collide and produce his sun and stars, his light and heat. He could originate and develop life in all its infinite forms. To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man’s mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world, his crowning achievement, which would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny. He would, in other words, be like God.

Note: Even today, we are told, we are exposed to one hundred million times more radiation than our grandparents