All the inhabitants of the earth were to worship him, except those whose names were in the book of life.  Thank God that even during the dark age of Romanism a people existed who were owned by the Lord and who refused to render idolatrous worship to this tyrannical beast.  For further information regarding these medieval Christians, see remarks on chapter 11:3.  But these saints who opposed the Papal assumptions were made the object of fearful persecutions, until Rome glutted herself upon the blood of millions of God’s holy saints.  This will be more fully described in chapter 17, where this apostate church appears under another symbol, “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”  In all their severe trials, however, they were comforted with the knowledge that Justice would not always sleep, but that a time would come when her retributive hand would be stretched forth to lead into captivity their persecuting enemies and break their world-wide reign of tyranny and usurpation.  “Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”  To a number of people God gave special foresight of the coming reformation of the sixteenth century, in which the universal spiritual supremacy of the Papacy ended.  A few of the many examples will be profitable.

Says D’Aubigne:  “John Huss preached in Bohemia a century before Luther preached in Saxony.  He seems to have penetrated deeper than his predecessors into the essence of Christian truth.  He prayed to Christ for grace to glory only in his cross, and in the inestimable humiliation of his sufferings....  He was, if we may be allowed the expression, the John Baptist of the reformation.  The flames of his pile kindled a fire in the church that cast a brilliant light into the surrounding darkness, and whose glimmerings were not to be so readily extinguished.  John Huss did more:  prophetic words issued from the depths of his dungeon.  He foresaw that a real reformation of the church was at hand.  When driven out of Prague and compelled to wander through the fields of Bohemia, where an immense crowd followed his steps and hung upon his words, he had cried out:  ’The wicked have begun by preparing a treacherous snare for a goose.  But if even the goose, which is only a domestic bird, a peaceful animal, and whose flight is not very far in the air, has nevertheless broken through their toils, other birds, soaring more boldly towards the sky, will break through them with still greater force.  Instead of a feeble goose, the truth will send forth eagles and keen-eyed vultures.’  This prediction was fulfilled by the reformers.