The Holy Scripture - english version B.indd - Sabbat

Double Foreview of the Reformation.427of power on the part of the Papacy and the Papal nations ; and as time passedon, a gradual growth in political influence, material prosperity, intellectualenlightenment, and social condition, on the part of Protestant nations. But at firstthe struggle was a sore one. Just as Pharaoh pursued the people after he had beencompelled reluctantyl to let them go, and pursued them to the annihilation of hisown power, so Rome pursued the young Protestant Churchesof Europe to her own undoing in the end. She stirredup opposition and international conflicts, instigatedbloody massacres and cruel exiles and banishments, andplunged the reformed communities into a sea of sorrow and trouble : witnessthe terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 60,000 victimsin France, the Marian persecutions in England, the cruel slaughterin six brief year of 18,000 Protestants in the Netherlands,the desolating Thirty Years' War in central Europe, andthe revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which in 1685 exiled 400,000Huguenots from France and caused the death of nearly as manymore. This may be regarded as the last great acot of thePapal war against the witnesses. Protestantism had to pass through along dawn out agony before Rome recognised, not its right to exist, for she stilldenies that, but its existence and growth as a fact against which it was useless tofight. It was not till the close of the seventeenth century, not until the gloriousRevolution which placed William of Orange on the throne of England in 1689,that Protestantism was firmly established in England. This event took place aboutthree and a half years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Papal supremacyhad been abrogated in England in 1534, but in the eign of Mary and again underthe Popish Stuarts its very existence was imperilled afresh. The Peace of Ryswick,at the close of 1697, first completely established the civil and religious liberty ofProtestantism.All this proves that while the first stage of the resurrection of the "witnesses"took place at the commencement of the Reformation movement of the sixteenthcentury, their exaltation to political power and supremacy, the establishmentof Protestantism, occupied a much longer interval. Like all other similar greatmovements, the Reformation, starting from an epoch, extended over an era.Space forbids the exposition of the chronology of this most remarkable period,including its relation of the 1,260 years of prophecy. Suffice it to say, the theinterval from A.D. 1534, the date of the abrogation of Papal supremacy in England,and of the publication of Luther's Bible in Germany, to A.D. 1697-8, the date ofthe complete establishment of Protestantism at the Peace of Ryswick, is separatedby exactly 1,260 ... years from A.D. 312-476 [538 till 1798!], or the period whichextended from the fall of paganism at the conversion of Constantine to the fall ofthe western Roman empire.I have not attempted, nor could I in the compass of this lecture attempt, toexpound fully the wonderful Reformation vision of the book of Revelation. I haveonly glanced at its leading features. There is in it very much more of the deepestinterest which I dare not touch at this time because it would take me too far. Buthave I not said enough to convince you that the great and blessed revival of true