Fast day. Visited the Bishop of St. Asaph; his conversation was on the Vaudois in Savoy, who had been thought so near destruction and final[Pg 304] extirpation by the French, being totally given up to slaughter, so that there were no hopes for them; but now it pleased God that the Duke of Savoy, who had hitherto joined with the French in their persecution, being now pressed by them to deliver up Saluzzo and Turin as cautionary towns, on suspicion that he might at last come into the Confederacy of the German Princes, did secretly concert measures with, and afterward declared for, them. He then invited these poor people from their dispersion among the mountains whither they had fled, and restored them to their country, their dwellings, and the exercise of their religion, and begged pardon for the ill usage they had received, charging it on the cruelty of the French who forced him to it. These being the remainder of those persecuted Christians which the Bishop of St. Asaph had so long affirmed to be the two witnesses spoken of in the Revelation, who should be killed and brought to life again, it was looked on as an extraordinary thing that this prophesying Bishop should persuade two fugitive ministers of the Vaudois to return to their country, and furnish them with £20 toward their journey, at that very time when nothing but universal destruction was to be expected, assuring them and showing them from the Apocalypse, that their countrymen should be returned safely to their country before they arrived. This happening contrary to all expectation and appearance, did exceedingly credit the Bishop's confidence how that prophecy of the witnesses should come to pass, just at the time, and the very month, he had spoken of some years before.
I afterward went with him to Mr. Boyle and Lady Ranelagh his sister, to whom he explained the necessity of it so fully, and so learnedly made out, with what events were immediately to follow, viz, the French King's ruin, the calling of the Jews to be near at hand, but that the Kingdom of Antichrist would not yet be utterly destroyed till thirty years, when Christ should begin the Millenium, not as personally and visibly reigning on earth, but that the true religion and universal peace should obtain through all the world. He showed how Mr. Brightman, Mr. Mede, and other interpreters of these events failed, by mistaking and reckoning the year as the Latins and others did, to consist of the present cal[Pg 305]culation, so many days to the year, whereas the Apocalypse reckons after the Persian account, as Daniel did, whose visions St. John all along explains as meaning only the Christian Church.