NO LASTING CITY

All things pass. Glory fades. Nature groans in labor. The day of the Lord is coming, and with it will come the end of the entire created order.

And yet so many of us live with our eyes fixed on this passing world only, rather than on the everlasting world to come. Preoccupied with earthly pleasures and cares, we ignore our eternal destiny.

This was no less true in the late nineteenth century, when Father Charles Arminjon, a priest from the mountains of southeastern France, assembled his flock in the town cathedral to preach a series of conferences to help them turn their thoughts away from this life's mean material affairs--and toward the next life's glorious spiritual reward. His wise and uncompromising words deepened in them the spirit of recollection that all Christians must have: the abiding conviction that heavenly aims, not temporal enthusiasms, must guide everything we think, say, and do.

When Father Arminjon's conferences were later published in a book, many others were able to reap the same benefit--including fourteen-year-old Therese Martin, then on the cusp of entering the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Reading it, she says, "plunged my soul into a happiness not of this earth."� Young Therese, filled with a sense of "what God reserves for those who love him, and seeing that the eternal rewards had no proportion to the light sacrifices of life,"� copied out numerous passages and memorized them, "repeating unceasingly the words of love burning in my heart."�

Now the very book that so inspired the Little Flower is available for the first time in English.

Let the pages of The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life fill you with the same burning words of love, with the same ardent desire to know God above all created things, that St. Therese gained from them. Let them also enrich your understanding of certain teachings of the Faith that can often seem so mysterious, even frightening:
# The signs that will precede the world's end
# The coming of the Antichrist, and how to recognize him
# The Judgment and where it may send us: heaven, hell, and purgatory
# Biblical end-times prophecy: how to read it and not be deceived

Jesus commands us to be ever-watchful for his return, and ever-mindful that we have no lasting city on earth. The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life is an invaluable aid to inculcating in your spirit that heavenly orientation, without which true human happiness cannot be found--in this world or the next.

By Fr. Charles Arminjon

Paperback: 308 pages

ISBN-10: 1933184388