“They threaten us with consequences if we refuse to call what is good, evil, and what is evil, good,” said George, “They demand [we] conform our thinking to their orthodoxy, or else say nothing at all.” Break their rules and, like the beleaguered Christians in Benson’s novel, we could pay a steep price in our careers, our social standing, our friendships, our fortunes, and our futures.

“The world of 1906,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter in her biography of Winston Churchill, “was a stable and a civilized world in which the greatness and authority of Britain and her Empire seemed unassailable and invulnerably secure…. Powerful, prosperous, peace-loving, with the seas all round us and the Royal Navy on the seas, the social, economic, international order seemed to our unseeing eyes as firmly fixed on earth as the signs of the Zodiac in the sky.”

Think of it: living before the devastation and slaughter of World War I, before the rise of Communism and the upheaval of the Russian Revolution, in an age far more innocent than our own. The prosperity and stability of the British Empire in the Victorian Era would, people thought, only grow stronger with a new king, in a new century, enlightened by the bright beams of progress.

Of course, not everyone was fooled.

In 1907, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, reading the signs most people didn’t noticed, published his dystopian End Times novel, Lord of the World. Set in the early twenty-first century, Benson foresaw a time when busy workers “had learned at least the primary lessons of the gospel that there was no God but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster.” He envisioned a world in which Christianity had all but vanished with little hope of resurgence, a world where the marginalization of Christians morphed into persecution and finally genocide.

In the novel, an elderly statesman explains the situation to a young priest: “First, you see, there was Materialism, pure and simple that failed more or less—it was too crude—until psychology came to the rescue. Now psychology claims all the rest of the ground; and the supernatural sense seems accounted for. That’s the claim. No, father, we are losing; and we shall go on losing, and I think we must ever be ready for a catastrophe at any moment.”

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