be little worse than what Christians were already gladly and fearlessly suffering for Christ. The first of the church fathers who devotes an extensive discussion to the coming of Antichrist and the Great Tribulation is Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in the late second century A. D. Irenaeus was a thoroughgoing premillenarian, the first, in fact, to give us a premillennial system of interpretation; but he did not believe in an any-moment coming of Christ and a rapture of the Church before the