Archbishop Seraphim at RussianFaith.com:
When the royal authority falls and the nations everywhere start self-government (republics, democracies), then the Antichrist will be free to act.
It will not be difficult for Satan to prepare the votes to renounce Christ, as the experience of the French Revolution showed. There will be no one to say veto – overbearing. The humble statement of faith will not be listened to. So, when such an order is established everywhere, conducive to the disclosure of anti-Christian aspirations, then anti-Christ will appear. Until that time he will wait and hold on. Such thoughts are suggested by the words of St. Chrysostom, who presented royal power under the guise of the Roman state. “When,” he says, “the Roman state (i.e., the royal power) ceases to exist, then the Antichrist will come. Because as long as this state (this royal power) will be feared, no one will soon submit to the Antichrist; but after it is destroyed (this power will cease), there will be no power – and he will rush to steal all human and divine power.
Russian society was not able to make use of this greatest power, due to their improper attitude towards the imperial autocratic power, more precisely – due to lack of faith in the divine truths regarding this power. And meanwhile, for this, as well as in general for the Orthodox faith, the Lord sent down to the Russian people the grace of the Holy Spirit, an indestructible Divine power in the struggle against all evil. And what kind of faith could we talk about before the destruction of our homeland, when the Russian intelligentsia, in its overwhelming majority, became unbelieving and even God-fighting, or was totally indifferent to the autocratic power of the Tsar Anointed?
Russian people of the latter type were far from the true faith, and in particular from belief in the divinely-revealed truths about royal authority, and as such they were not at all aware of its greatest saving significance. They did not even know whether it was necessary to defend it, and therefore preferred to swim in the general Russian progressive current, as long as the seal of Black Hundreds was not put on them. Only the smallest part of Russian society was conscious of the importance of the autocracy, and was ready to unite around its Tsar as the saving force for Russia, as the source of its greatness and glory. But this part was small and lonely, just as our Tsar himself was lonely in the midst of the sea of raging liberalism in Russia, which, together with the Orthodox faith, eradicated from Russia any thought of the godly establishment of royal power.
It is this lack of Orthodox faith in Russian society that explains the success of the destructive force of our enemies, why they reached their goal and destroyed the greatest power in the world in terms of its power and glory. If only, under the influence of the fiery trials, we shall come to our senses and begin to strive to revive Russia, on the basis of faith in the Divine Scriptures, in all its saving and immutable truths concerning all the areas of our life, not excluding the area of the state power of the Tsar, God’s Anointed.
If we take the question of royal authority to be only a problem, if we do not have a proper attitude towards it on the basis of Orthodox faith, if we discuss whether it was established by God or not, and even if we maintain that it is not based on Holy Scripture, that in itself has no value and cannot be an object of our attention, then, when the possibility of Russia’s rebirth comes, its enemies will again take advantage of our unworthy attitude towards the royal power, in which case we shall never see it reborn. To be Russian Orthodox people in the position of Krylov’s metaphysics now, at the greatest misfortunes, into which we have fallen, is not only ridiculous, but also sinful.
Therefore, it is necessary to look at the teaching of the Divine Scriptures about the royal power as the clearest, most positive, unquestionable truth. Let us be as far away as possible from rationalist thought, which is very harmful for the revival of our homeland, and which considers the question of royalty to be a problem. Let us look at this question through the eyes of Orthodox faith, that is, let us not doubt that for all time, in the most definite way, rather than problematically, it has already been solved in Divine Scripture. Therefore we must profess faith in the divine truths about royal authority, keeping in mind that we can have nothing in common with rationalism, which destroys this saving faith, without which the rebirth of Russia is impossible.