ABSTRACT
The Protestant mission was held back by various factors, both structural and ideological. Protestants remained deeply embattled in the seventeenth century, focused on survival more than expansion, preoccupied by the Catholic threat. Early modern English-speaking Protestants could make no such boasts, and they had to find other ways to counter the amplitude apologetic. Anti-Catholicism was hardwired into Protestant eschatology. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English commentators shared the Reformers’ belief that the Roman Papacy was the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation. Protestants were aware of the Chinese rites controversy, in which Dominicans and Franciscans had reported the Jesuits to Rome for permitting their converts to persist in ancestral and imperial rituals. The challenge was both polemical and practical. Protestants were aware of the Chinese rites controversy, in which Dominicans and Franciscans had reported the Jesuits to Rome for permitting their converts to persist in ancestral and imperial rituals.
