A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

1. The opposition. Satan being cast out of this old Heathen empire, the great red dragon, after so •ore a conflict with Michael and his angels for the greater part of three hundred years, being at last entirely routed and vanquished, so that no pl•ce was found any more in heaven for him, but he was cast down, as it were, from heaven to the earth; yet does not give over his opposition to the woman, the church of Christ, concerning which all this conflict had been. But he is still in a rage, and renews his attempts, and has recourse to new devices against the church. The serpent, after he is cast out of heaven to the earth, casts out of his mouth water as a flood, to cause the woman to be carried away of the flood. The opposition that he made to the church of Christ before the rise of Antichrist, was principally of two sorts. It was either by corrupting the church of Christ with heresies, or by new endeavours to restore Paganism.

(1) I would observe, that after the destruction of the Heathen Roman empire, Satan infested the church with heresies. Though there had been so glorious a work of God in delivering the church from her Heathen persecutors, and overthrowing the Heathen empire; yet the days of the church's travail not being ended, and the set time of her prosperity not being yet come, as being what was to succeed the fa•l of Antichrist, therefore the peace and prosperity which the church enjoyed in Constantine's time, was but very shor•: it was a respite, which gave the church a time of peace and silence, as it were, for half an hour, wherein the four angels held the four winds from blowing, till the servants of God should be sealed in their foreheads. But the church soon began to be greatly infested with heresies; the two principal, and those which did most infest the church, were the Arian and Pelagian heresies.