can universally reach to, it cannot be fully satisfied or answered from thence.... but will in the full latitude, through the universal Church in these times be made clear, from the recent evidences that we have, viz. from the consent of the Greek and Latin fathers, who generally resolve that Bishops are those successors.
Taylor, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor.—On Episcopacy. Introduction.
Antichrist must come at last, and the great apostasy foretold must be, and this not without means proportionable to the production of so great declensions of Christianity. "When ye hear of wars and rumours of wars, be not afraid," says our Blessed Saviour, "the end is not yet." It is not war that will do "this great work of destruction;" for then it might have been done long ere now. What then will do it? We shall know when we see it. In the mean time, when we shall find a new device, of which, indeed, the platform was laid, in Aerius and the Acephali, brought to a good possibility of completing a thing, that whosoever shall hear, his ears shall tingle, "an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not," "in sacris" in holy persons, and places, and offices, it is too probable that this is the preparatory for the Antichrist, and grand apostasy.
For if Antichrist shall exalt himself above all that is called God, and in Scripture none but kings and priests are such, "dii vocati, dii facti," I think we have great reason to be suspicious, that he that divests both of their power, (and they are, if the king be Christian, in very near conjunction,) does the work of Antichrist for him; especially if the men whom it most concerns will but call to mind, that if the discipline or government which Christ hath instituted is that kingdom by which He governs all Christendom, (so themselves have taught us,) when they (to use their own expressions) throw Christ out of His kingdom; and then either they leave the Church without a head, or else put Antichrist in substitution.
We all wish that our fears in this and all things else may be vain, that what we fear may not come upon us; but yet that the abolition of episcopacy is the forerunner, and preparatory to the
