Besides SS. Peter, Paul, and John, S. Jude is the only other apostle, we believe, who has bequeathed to the church predictions of the terrible apostasy of Antichrist which is to consummate the trial of the faith of the saints under the very shadow of the coming judgment. We will take them in the order in which they occur. The first is in a letter of S. Paul to the church at Thessalonica, where, exhorting them not to “be terrified as if the day of the Lord were at hand,” he assures them that it will not come “before there shall have first happened an apostasy, and the man of sin shall have been revealed, the son of perdition--he who opposes himself to, and raises himself above, all that is called God, or that is held in honor, so that he may sit in the temple of God, showing himself as if he were God.… And you know what now is hindering his being revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already working; only so that he who is now keeping it in check will keep it in check until he be moved out of its way. And then will the lawless one be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and destroy with the illumination of his coming; whose coming is after the manner of working of Satan, with all strength and symbols, and lying absurdities, and in every enticement of iniquity in those who perish; for the reason that they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. So God will send them the working of error, that they may believe falsehood; that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity.”[23] In a letter to Timothy, Bishop of Ephesus, S. Paul writes: “Now, the Spirit says expressly that, in the last times, some shall apostatize from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error and to doctrines of demons, speaking falsehood in hypocrisy, and having their own conscience seared.”[24] In a second letter to the same bishop he writes: “Know this, moreover: that in the last days there will be a pressure of perilous times; men will be self-lovers, covetous, lifted up, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, malicious, without affection, discontented, calumniators, incontinent, hard, unamiable, traitors, froward, fearful, and lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having indeed a form of piety, but denying its power.”[25] S. Peter writes that “there will come in the last days mockers in deception, walking according to their own lusts.”[26] S. Jude describes them as “mockers, walking in impieties according to their own desires. These are they who separate themselves--animals, not having the Spirit.”[27]