Refusing to practice a religion foreign to your conscience and belief is the very epitome of what it means to be Protestant. When a tyrannical power forbids a people from practicing according to their own religious belief and conscience, and they do so anyway, even if in secret, they are acting in Protest. James A. Wylie brings the principle that is Protestantism nearer in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ to its beginning.

We learn in this book that there were protesters long before the moniker became universally used following the 16th century. First there were those that protested against the leaders of the Jewish Religion; then those who protested against the forced pagan practices of the Roman Empire, even called atheist for refusing to worship the many gods; and finally, those who during the 1,260-year reign of the Papal antichrist system, in protest refused to bow the knee to his religious tyranny.

Church government revealed in the pages of scripture was local in nature; we read of “the church at” this town or that, with a bishop, pastors, and elders over the local flock, with Christ the Head over all – the universal mediator between God and man. When one bishop at Rome claimed the power of Bishop of bishops, usurping the place of Christ to himself and using the power of the civil government to enforce that position, even upon the pain of death, then began in earnest the 1,260 year reign of “the man of sin” seated in the temple of God, the church, taking the place of God in the hearts and minds of the visible church on earth, introducing the abomination of her fornication with the kings of the earth to the world; the great apostasy.