The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Bernard-Catholic Witnesses Substantiate Protestant Claims

NICHOLAS BERNARD (d. 1661) was born about the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was educated at Cambridge. Having migrated to Ireland, he was ordained by Archbishop Ussher in 1626. He became the archbishop’s chaplain and librarian, and then was made dean of Kilmore. He received an M.A. from Oxford in 1628, and in 1637 became dean of Ardagh. Probably about 1649 he returned to England, and was appointed preacher of Gray’s Inn, London, as well as chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. Shortly before his death Bernard published Certain Discourses—a painstakingly documented tracing of the “consent of the Fathers” of the first four centuries, which testifies to the fact that the “successor to the Emperour in Rome” is the “man of sinne. ⁷ PFF2 561.2

Bernard says that an endless number of authors have given their testimony that “after the Emperour was put out of Rome,” the “Bishop of Rome had succeeded him, viz. after the 600 years after Christ.” Then he parades the testimony of Catholic leaders from A.D. 1100 onward to show how, prior to the Reformation, the prophecies on Antichrist had been applied to the apostate See of Rome—by the bishop of Florence, Archbishop Eberhard of Salzburg, Honorius of Autun, Bernard of Cluny, Joachim of Floris, John of Salisbury, Robert Grosthead, Occam, Petrarch, the Waldenses, Wyclif, Purvey, Huss, and Savonarola. ⁸ PFF2 561.3

Next the witness of English bishops is summoned-like Jewel, Abbot, Whitgift, and Andrewes to testify of papal Rome as Babylon, Antichrist, and the Man of Sin. ⁹ And this is all stressed to show that Antichrist is a successive dynasty, and not an individual pope-Bernard basing his argument on the prophecy of Daniel 7, with its four empires, and on Revelation 17, with its seventh head as the successive government of the pope reigning as head of the church. ¹⁰ PFF2 561.4