Customer Reviews

Lord of the World

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This is an excellent edition of Benson's classic work. Unlike many other recent editions of Benson's books (Come Rack Come Rope, Oddsfish, etc.), this edition has not been abridged.
It is the story of the future world from a turn of the century vantage point. Protestantism has fizzled, the Mason's have triumphed, and Catholicism is on the defensive. The world has divided into three parties, and a silver tongued savior comes to save the day. Benson believed that armageddon would more likely result from smooth talking and twisted ideologies than from naked evil.
Although Benson may have over estimated the Masons and underestimated Protestants, he makes many surprisingly accurate predictions. The rhetoric used by the Bolshevists in Russia, the Nazi's in Germany, and the parties of the Spanish civil war was foreseen by Benson. The great white line Hitler painted around the Vatican and the Atomic bomb were also not beyond Benson's imagination.
Unfortunately, only a small audience will appreciate this book, but that audience should include all Catholics who take ideas and the modern threat seriously. This book helps explain the beauty of pre-Vatican II ceremonies without siding against the changes of Vatican II.

R.H. Benson wrote two mystical visions of the future. _The Dawn of All_ is an extremely romantic and improbable 1911 parable of a 1971 world mostly Catholic and at peace, ready for the Second Coming. _The Lord of the World_ came first, in 1907, and was a darker vision. A world of flying craft, major scientific advances, and comfort has become a place of materialist despair. Euthanasia is routine, for the desperately ill and the terminally bored. Oliver and Mabel Brand, a rising young couple, are the golden ones -- Oliver becomes a major political figure, but Mabel chooses the cool despairing end of legal euthanasia. Father Percy Franklin is one of the last Catholic priests in a world hostile to freedom, church, university, and history. Eventually elected the last Pope, he is restricted to the dusty forgotten village of Nazareth. Julian Felsenburgh is a charismatic American adventurer who means to and does become Lord of the World, anti-Christ. Details are less important than the very modern mood. Believing in progress as the only good, people are swept into any movement that promises it. The past is ruthlessly exterminated. The quest for one world government that begins with Esperanto ends with one world dictatorship.

Msgr. Robert Benson analyses the end times and the influence of the antichrist upon government, individuals, and even the Church. His insightful approach and convincing arguments offer much for meditation regarding the direction of modern thought. Written at the turn of the century, Msgr. Benson's novel announces the conclusions of such trends with chilling accuracy. His style is simple, yet captivating, and far from striking terror and fear into his readers, however, Benson inspires with the Faith and the truths of salvation within the Church.

As an evangelical with strong Catholic sympathies, I was excited to discover "Lord of the World" for another twist on the "Left Behind" scenario. The author writes at the dawn of the twentieth century and hits a few predictions about our world dead-on. But better yet is the sense of gravity Benson conveys in the novel. You really feel the earth coming to a conclusion, the ultimate clash of faith in God versus faith in Man.

"A Century before Left Behind there was Lord of the World," reads the cover blurb in the striking Wildside Press edition. But while both books deal with end times, that's where the similarities end. In Benson's vision, Catholics are the last remaining Christians. The Left Behind books, named for a line in Larry Norman's song, "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," on the other hand, follow the idea of the rapture popularized in Hal Lindsey's bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth.

I ordered this book from Amazon after reading Gwen Watkins' essay in Charles Williams: A Celebration (also available from Amazon) comparing Benson and Williams as writers. Williams being my favorite author, I was very excited to come upon a similarly gifted novelist. Benson wrote Lord of the World in 1907; it takes place in a future about a century later (around now). That's also around the time that Chesterton wrote his novels. Both he and Benson write so colorfully that it's sometimes hard to know what's going on. Whether people were more imaginative then or that was the style at the turn of the century I don't know. But having read GKC helps one read Benson, and vice versa.

Williams is often held to be obscure for his descriptions of supernatural and occultic ritual. Benson's obscurity lies in his pre-Vatican II Catholic vocabulary and bits of the Latin Mass, which will not be familiar to many readers. That aside, this is an absolutely gripping story. Having once started, I couldn't put the book down. Uncannily, in this 1907 novel, Benson prophesied a dark future that became reality, first in Germany and then in the USSR. Writing in the then new genre of science fiction, he envisioned a technologically advanced world nevertheless rushing headlong to destruction. It's amazing how contemporary he sounds as he looks forward in time to our present and his future.

Robert Hugh Benson grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, when it looked like Socialism would sweep over the world and make religious worship outmoded. His father was Archbishop of Canterbury; and he joined the Church of England but later converted to Catholicism. In his introduction to this book he wrote that he took the idea of Man (not the Son of Man) becoming the ideal and 'took it where it would go'.

Knowing that this book was written in 1904, before the Great War and the dissolution of the European Empires, and the nascent beginning of flight, it is interesting to read his views of what the world would look like in 100 years (or about now). He saw the end of poverty and hunger, and the raising of HUMANITY to the paramount position. His views on woman are arcane, as one of his characters dismissed his wife as 'just a woman', and that they make no strides of independence. He talks about inter-city flight at the amazing speed of 150mph, one year after Kitty Hawk.

The stories bottom line is that once Man begins to worship himself (in the guise of Julian Felsenburg), he not only has no need for idealized religion, but that the persecution of anyone who disagrees will become an act of Sedition and punishable by death. Religion is represented in this story by Roman Catholicism (all others having given in and disbanded, except for a few 'elderly jews wandering in Palestine) which fights a peaceable rear guard action against the forces of HUMANITY.

The language is a little difficult and flowery, while the ideas are interesting but sometimes the catholicism is hard to comprehend, but all in all it's worth reading.

WOW! I guess the surprise of finding this book and the circumstances that we see playing out in America and the world in early 2009 factor into the impact it had on me. Anyone familiar with the Trilateral Commission (Google it) will recognize the situation as eerily prophetic and maybe even imminent.

With a global crisis and an enigmatic, charismatic politician and "Man of Peace" Julian Felsenberg hailing from America (his name means youthful, rock mountain) the stage is set for the final conflict.

It was too real, too close to put down. It is what every practicing Catholic both hopes for and fears.

This book is amazing. It has helped me realize what this world would be like without the catholic church, the inherent dangers of secularism, and the path to rectify the evil of modernism. By doing this, it has helped bring me back to the catholic church. This author is on par with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell in both his ability to visualize alternate worlds with precise understanding and his ability to write in a eloquent yet succinct manner. It is a short book and I highly recommend it.

Robert Hugh Benson (born November 18, 1871; died October 19, 1914) was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and younger brother of Edward Frederic Benson. Benson studied Classics and Theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1893. In 1895, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father.

His father died suddenly in 1896, and Benson was sent on a trip to the Middle East to recover his own health. While there, he began to question the status of the Church of England and to consider the claims of the Roman Catholic Church. His own piety began to tend toward the High Church variety, and he started exploring religious life in various Anglican communities, eventually obtaining permission to join the Community of the Resurrection.

Benson made his profession as a member of the community in 1901, at which time he had no thoughts of leaving the Church of England. But as he continued his studies and began writing, he became more and more uneasy with his own doctrinal position, and on September 11, 1903, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904 and sent to Cambridge. He continued his writing career along with the usual elements of priestly ministry. He was named a monsignor in 1911.

Lord of the World is one of his more exemplary works and well worth reading.

Monsignor Benson's prescient 1907 Apocalyptic novel is a classic of its genre, and a telling lesson to anyone wanting to know how the Left Behind books would have read had they been written by someone with literary talent, imagination and theological comprehension. He writes with elegance and is downright prophetic in this Edwardian work. He predicts Communism, nuclear bombs, the fall of the European monarchies, euthanasia, secular humanism, and passenger airplanes (although in a typically English touch, their heating system is inadequate!). Benson could have made a nice career as a secular writer, particularly in science fiction, had he so chosen. My only criticism is that his descriptions of scenery and the interior life of certain characters are bit lengthy, his characterizations were somewhat superficial, and his Apocalypse was a bit of an anticlimax. However he was a perceptive observer of humanity and wrote a pretty memorable story. If the End Times interest you, this is a must-read.