“The living and the dead.”  We may take this in a double sense.  As the general judgment will come suddenly and when not expected, all will be going on in the world as usual—­some attending to business, others taking their ease as they do now, or as they were doing when the deluge came upon them.  Just when the judgment is about to take place, God will destroy the earth; and then all those living in the world will perish with its destruction and then be judged.  The “dead” means, therefore, all those who died before the destruction of the world, and the “living” all those who were on earth when the time of its destruction came.  Or the “living” may mean also those in a state of grace, and the “dead” those in mortal sin; for God will judge both classes.

“Holy Ghost,” i.e., the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.  Ghost is an old word meaning spirit.  When persons say that a ghost appeared, they mean that the spirit of some dead person appeared.  These stories about ghosts are told generally to frighten children or timid persons.  If those who thought they saw a ghost always examined what they saw, they would find that the supposed ghost was something very natural; probably a bush swayed by the wind, or a stray animal, or perhaps some person trying to frighten them.  Ghost here does not mean the spirit of a dead person, but the Holy Spirit, which is the proper name for the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.

“The communion of saints.”  There are three parts in the Church.  We have, first, the Church Militant, i.e., the fighting Church, made up of all the faithful upon earth, who are still fighting for their salvation.  The Holy Scripture tells us our life upon earth is a warfare.  We have three enemies to fight.  First, the devil, who by every means wishes to keep us out of Heaven—­the place he once enjoyed himself.  The devil knows well the happiness of Heaven, and does not wish us to have what he cannot have himself; just as you sometimes see persons who, through their own fault, have lost their situation trying to keep others out of it.

Our second enemy is the world.  This does not mean the earth with all its beauty and riches, but the bad people in the world with their false doctrines; some telling us there is no God, Heaven, or Hell, others that we should pay no attention to the teaching of the Church or the laws of God, and advising us by word and example to resist our lawful superiors in Church or State and give free indulgence to our sinful passions.

The third enemy is our own flesh.  By this we mean our concupiscence, that is, our passions, evil inclinations, and propensity to do wrong.  When God first created man, the soul was always master over the body, and the body obedient to the soul.  After Adam sinned, the body rebelled against the soul and tried to lead it into sin.  The body is the part of our nature that makes us like the brute animals, while the soul makes us like to God and the angels.