To the Reader

To the Reader

How Popery and^a Prelacy came first to be contracted, is not my enquiry; but sure I am, they are here very far a sunder, such as do apply that of Babylon (Rev. 17.) and the Man of sin (2 Thes. 2.) to the Pope can hardly be accounted Popish, which you find affirmed by the late Archbishop of Armagh, and Bishop Bedell, in their discussing of the same words, And who are supported in if by the most Eminent Bishops of England and Ireland, since the Reformation. ⟨image 5⟩Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Jewell; Abbot, Bilson, Andrews, Downham, Morton, Hall, Davenant, Prideaux, with others, who have unanimously given their votes the same way, as is hereafter shown, And indeed it could not be otherwise expected from some of them who had been taught to put him into their^b Litany, From the Tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities, Good Lord deliver us. So that if any of later years professing themselves to be the sons of those old Prophets, have so far favoured the See of Rome, as to divert the stream of that application some other way, it appears they have in it degenerated from their Ancestors.

HOw Popery and^a Prelacy came first to be contracted, is not my enquiry; but sure I am, they are here very far a sunder, such as do apply that of Babylon (Rev. 17.) and the Man of sin (2 Thes. 2.) to the Pope can hardly be accounted Popish, which you find affirmed by the late Archbishop of Armagh, and Bishop Bedell, in their discussing of the same words, And who are supported in if by the most Eminent Bishops of England and Ireland, since the Reformation.