If this position be true, then those of other persuasions might also lay claim to that prerogative; because among them sometimes there have been pious men who predicted remarkable things, which afterwards really happened; as among the rest, James Usher, archbishop of Armagh, and primate of Ireland, who foretold the rebellion in Ireland forty years before it came to pass; besides the intestine war and miseries that befel England, and other things that were fulfilled: which leads us not to reject as frivolous his prediction of the dreadful persecution that would fall upon all the Protestant churches by the Papists; for though one of his friends once objected to him, that since Great Britain and Ireland had already suffered so deeply, there was reason to hope that the judgments of God in respect of these kingdoms might have been past; yet he replied to it, ‘Fool not yourselves with such hopes, for I tell you all you have yet seen hath been but the beginning of sorrows, to what is yet to come upon the Protestant churches of Christ, who will ere long fall under a sharper persecution than ever yet hath been upon them. And therefore look you be not found in the outward court, but a worshipper in the temple before the altar: for Christ will measure all those that profess his name, and call themselves his people; and the outward worshippers he will leave out, to be trodden down by the Gentiles. The outward court is the formal Christian, whose religion lies in performing the outside duties of Christianity, without having an inward life and power of faith and love, uniting them to Christ: and these God will leave to be trodden down and swept away by the Gentiles. But the worshippers within the temple and before the altar, are those who indeed worship God in spirit and in truth: whose souls are made his temples, and he is honoured and adored in the most inward thoughts of their hearts; and they sacrifice their lusts and vile affections, yea, and their own wills to him; and these God will hide in the hollow of his hand, and under the shadow of his wings. And this shall be the great difference between this last, and all the other preceding persecutions; for in the former the most eminent and spiritual ministers and Christians did generally suffer most, and were most violently fallen upon; but in this last persecution these shall be preserved by God as a seed to partake of that glory which shall immediately follow and come upon the church, as soon as ever this storm shall be over; for as it shall be the sharpest, so it shall be the shortest persecution of them all, and shall only take away the gross hypocrites and formal professors; but the true spiritual believers shall be preserved till the calamity be over past.’