that Mabel Brand condemned herself to Hell by committing suicide, Mgr. Benson wrote, "I think Mabel was alright, really. Honestly, she had no idea that suicide was a sin; and she did pray as well as she knew how at the end."Note that during Benson's lifetime, until the passing of the Suicide Act 1961 it was also then illegal to attempt suicide. In a 16 December 1907 letter to Mgr. Benson's brother, British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge wrote, "The assumption that there can be no religion except a grotesque return to Paganism, short of admitting the supremacy of Mediaeval Rome, is an unexpected contention to find in a modern book... I am wondering what the leaders of the Church think of it. Perhaps Pius X may approve; but it is difficult to suppose that it can meet with general approbation. If it does, it is very instructive." Some critics and readers misinterpreted the novel's last sentence as meaning, "the destruction, not of the world, but of the Church." Some Marxists were reportedly "delighted" by the ending and one non-Catholic reader wrote that Lord of the World had, "struck heaven out of my sky, and I don't know how to get it back again." Other readers were more admiring. Although "grave exception" was taken there to Mgr. Benson's "sympathetic treatment" of Mabel Brand's suicide, Lord of the World was enthusiastically received in France. In a letter to Mgr. Benson, Jesuit priest Fr. Joseph Rickaby wrote, "I have long thought that Antichrist would be no monster, but a most charming, decorous, attractive person, exactly your Felsenburgh. This is what the enemy has wanted, something to counteract the sweetness of Christmas, Good Friday, and Corpus Christi, which is the strength of Christianity. The abstruseness of Modernism, the emptiness of Absolutism, the farce of Humanitarianism, the bleakness (so felt by Huxley and Oliver Lodge) of sheer physical science, that is what your Antichrist makes up for. He is, as you have made him, the perfection of the Natural, away from and in antithesis to God and His Christ.... As Newman says, a man may be near death and yet not die, but still the alarms of his friends are each time justified and are finally fulfilled; so of the approach of Antichrist." Shortly after Mgr. Benson's novel was published, British historian and future Catholic convert Christopher Dawson paid a visit to Imperial Germany. While