1. In religious language, especially in catechetical instruction, we find the term “the last things” (novissima) used to designate the realities which form the limit — or lie beyond the limit — separating time, history of salvation or loss and free acts from their definitive and eternal fulfilment. Hence the last things are the various partial aspects of the one total definitive state of man, as individual before God, as member of humanity and as mankind entire. This total, definitive state of history can be i…