ceptable in these early days of the Anti-christ reign, so that it was
only among the little gatherings of true Believers, that marriage was
sanctified into the sacrament it had been in the _good, true_ old days.

[1] We prefer, in a book of this character, to keep back the actual
terms of the filthy statement. Author.

CHAPTER XIII.

"THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION."

The three-and-a-half years since the Covenant with Lucien Apleon, on
the night before the opening at the Temple in Jerusalem, had been
signed, had practically expired.

God's judgments had been seen in many ways upon the earth during these
forty-two months. The position which Apleon now held, as the "World's
Dictator," had not been the work of a day. Wars, no longer local, but
practically universal had, for many long months at a time, been the
order of the history of the world. "Nation shall rise against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom."

These wars occupying only months at this period, would have occupied
scores of years had they been events of the mid-nineteenth century.
But with the perfection of hideousness--one might safely write
_Hellishness_--of war's latest devices the work of destruction, and
almost annihilation became short and sharp.

Aerial warfare helped to bring about this consummation more speedily.
The firing of a bomb or of a torpedo from an aerial war engine often
accomplished in an hour what could not have been accomplished, a few
years before, under months, often years of old-fashioned war.

These fearful conflicts were not confined to those of kingdom and
nation against kingdom and nation, but citizens of one city fought with
themselves, civil war was "on the rampage." The lust of war, the lust
of blood, born of vile passions, burned in the breasts of men and
women--for with the growth of the "woman's rights" question, and the
establishment of the "equality of the sexes," bands of women fought
bands of women.

These Amazons, indeed, wrought even fouler cruelties and butcheries
than the men, for as there is no fouler odour under the sun than that
of rotted lilies, so the depths to which "the lilies of the human
kind"--women--will descend is fouler and deeper than the abysses of
fall of men.

The hideous wars--international, civil, and _personal_
conflicts--resulted, as wars ever do, in famine and pestilence. Only
in this case, these later horrors had been fearfully aggravated,
terribly prolonged.

The p