The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: French Huguenots Hold Prophetic Banner High

From the 1572 Massacre of St. Bartholomew onward, the Huguenots, as the French Protestants were called, had a most precarious time. At last, at the close of the century, Henry IV extended religious toleration to the Huguenots, with the civil right to hold public office, by issuing the Edict of Nantes—sometimes called the “Charter of Protestant Liberties,” dated 1598. Soon after, in their convocation at Gap, October 1, 1603, the Huguenots made this united declaration concerning Antichrist in their Statement of Faith: PFF2 623.1

“Not only so, but the same assembly formally resolved to append to the 31st article of the Confession of Faith a very explicit declaration to the same effect, wherein the church professed its conviction that the Roman Pontiff was the Son of Perdition, predicted in the word of God under the emblem of the Harlot clothed in scarlet, seated on the seven hills of the great city, and reigning over the kings of the earth, and uttered its confident expectation that the Lord would consume him with the Spirit of His mouth and finally destroy him with the brightness of His coming. ¹ PFF2 623.2

Before taking up the seventeenth-century expositors, we pause briefly to note one of their writers just before the close of the previous century, whose life gives us a glimpse of the rigors of the time. PFF2 623.3