Lord of the World
About this audiobook
Secular humanism has triumphed. Everything the late Victorians and Edwardians believed would bring human happiness has been achieved: technology has made it so no one needs to work for a living, the social sciences ensure a smooth-running social order, and in the name of tolerance, religious beliefs have been uprooted and eliminated except for a single holdout: a largely discredited and rapidly shrinking Catholic Church. Yet people are unhappy.
What has been created is a sterile world of crass materialism, a world without spiritual dimension, a world where people daily choose legalized euthanasia over the emptiness of existence. Out of this culture of despair, there arises a charismatic leader: Julian Felsenburgh. Soon the masses are in Felsenburgh’s thrall and he becomes leader of the world. But in their eagerness for change, have the citizens of the world embraced the Antichrist and hastened the end of days?
Father Percy Franklin remains a bastion of stability, even as the Catholic Church disintegrates around him. Finally outlawed and driven underground, it is only this small and shrinking Church that stands against the “Lord of the World.”
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About the author
Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) was ordained as an Anglican priest by his father, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benson later joined the Church of Rome and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1904. He continued his writing career in addition to his ministry, publishing several ghost and horror stories. The dystopian novel Lord of the World is his best-known work.
Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.
