Death is the enemy of Life, but he has many friends among men, in all those authorities in whom a debased sense of Life is linked with temporary power.

I knew about the Age of Saints from earliest childhood. The evidence was all around me locally, even if come out of eternity. I was born by a former monastery. My family lived near Bury St Edmunds, in honour of St Edmund, whose mystical presence has followed and guided me all the days of my life, both here and overseas. Near me were old churches dedicated to St Albright, St Botolph, St Osyth and St Cedd (built by himself), St Felix and St Audrey.

I knew all of these places in childhood and then I also read of St Alfred, then later I discovered St Guthlac and read of St Cuthbert and discovered the unique mystical atmosphere in Hoxne in Suffolk, the place of St Edmund’s martyrdom. When I was twenty, I discovered Walsingham in Norfolk, where in a humble village in 1061 the Mother of God appeared in a last consolation of grace, outpoured at the end of the beginning, before the beginning of the end.

These saints taught me that the other world, which in childhood I knew of intuitively, is real. This world is not the real one. This is only a pale reflection, seen in a glass darkly, of the real one. The real one is just beyond the veil, on the other side, a glimmering country of Beauty and Wisdom, where a King and Queen reign, together with all these saints and many more. I understood then that the meaning of life is the seeking and living of that Kingdom just beyond.

Like many others, I was called on to glimpse the world beyond sense and strive to bring down fragments of its Beauty and Wisdom from its stars and to convey them to others, acting as a poor and unwitting messenger of the Sacred and the Eternal. But how did we get from that Age of Saints, who perceived that bright kingdom, from the seventh century on, to this Age of Sin, which does has never even heard of that country, in the twenty-first century?

Why did they undergo a millennium of decline? How did they replace God with man? Why did they make the seeing and singing of what is done in Paradise into a weapon to beat others? Why did the powerful try to make Christ into a political ideology with which to beat and humiliate the righteous? Why did they make Beauty into ugliness and Wisdom into folly? Why did they use Heaven to make a hell on earth, the opposite of the Lord’s Prayer?

I realised that there are the animists and atheists who had stopped before they reached God and then the Non-Christians who had stopped after they had reached the One God, before they had reached Christ. Then there were others who, though advancing further, had stopped after they had reached Christ. Then there were those in the West who, going further, had stopped before they had reached the Holy Spirit. For Him they had substituted others.

These were the quenchers of the Spirit, the Spirit-deniers, the mere formalists and the spoilers, the enemies of all spiritual progress, for there is no-one who can stop after the discovery of the Holy Spirit. But Christ is coming back to overturn the table of these Spirit-resisting frauds and moneychangers in His Father’s House and to return us to our roots. His righteous anger will be terrible to behold and then He will show us His bright Kingdom on a New Earth.