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The Coen Brothers award-winning  film of Cormac McCarthy’s  novel, No Country for Old Men, dramatizes the Last Days of Yeats famous poem “The Second Coming.”

In this world we understand what St Paul means when, in Ephesians, he observes “the days are evil.”

                   “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
                     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
                     The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                     Are full of passionate intensity.”

The personification of The Evil One, Anton Chigurh, roams the land:

                   “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
                     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
                     moves his slow thighs, while all about him
                     Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
                     The darkness drops again.”

For old law men, Roscoe, Ed Tom Bell, and Ellis, things have been getting worse for quite some time.

                 ROSCOE: It’s just beyond everything. What is it mean? What is it leading to?      If you’d a told me twenty years ago I’d see  children walking’ in the streets of our Texas towns with green  hair and bones in their noses I just flat out wouldn’t of believed  you.

                 BELL: Signs and wonders. But I think once you stop hearin’  “Sir” and “Madam” the rest is soon to follow.

                 ROSCOE: It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It is not the one  thing.

                 BELL: Not the one thing. I used to think I could at least some  way put things right. I don’t feel that way no more.

They need a savior more than ever. But Bell hasn’t heard from God:

                 BELL: I always thought when I got older God would sort of  come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I  was him I’d have the same opinion of me that he does.

                 ELLIS: You don’t know what he thinks….

Ellis explains life in the Present Evil Age:

                 ELLIS: What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on  people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem  to hold it to account….

Then Ellis reminds Bell and Ellis that salvation  comes from God, not men: The Kingdom of God enters by His will and efforts, not by ours.

                  ELLIS: You can’t stop what’s coming Ain’t all waitin’ on you.  That’s vanity.

Later Bell confesses that he has had dreams.

                   BELL: “Two of ’em. Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older  now ‘n he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the  younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember so well but it  was about meetin’ him in town somewheres and he give me  some money and I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we  was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’  through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the  mountains. It was cold and snowin’, hard ridin’. Hard country.  He rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by.  He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around  him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was  carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see  the horn from the light inside of it. About the color or the moon.
 And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he  was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark  and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would  be there. And then I woke up.”

Through dreams God has told Bell , and us, the  hope of John 14: 27-28:

                      “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You  heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.”