Bible and the French Revolution
225
ch. 17. “France is the only nation in the world concerning which the
authentic record survives, that as a nation she lifted her hand in open
rebellion against the Author of the universe. Plenty of blasphemers,
plenty of infidels, there have been, and still continue to be, in England,
Germany, Spain, and elsewhere; but France stands apart in the world’s
history as the single state which, by the decree of her Legislative
Assembly, pronounced that there was no God, and of which the entire
population of the capital, and a vast majority elsewhere, women as well
as men, danced and sang with joy in accepting the announcement.”—
Blackwood’s Magazine, November, 1870.
France presented also the characteristics which especially distin-
guished Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state
of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought
destruction upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents
together the atheism and the licentiousness of France, as given in
the prophecy: “Intimately connected with these laws affecting reli-
gion, was that which reduced the union of marriage—the most sacred
engagement which human beings can form, and the permanence of
which leads most strongly to the consolidation of society—to the state
of a mere civil contract of a transitory character, which any two per-
sons might engage in and cast loose at pleasure.... If fiends had set
themselves to work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying
whatever is venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and
of obtaining at the same time an assurance that the mischief which it
was their object to create should be perpetuated from one generation
to another, they could not have invented a more effectual plan that
the degradation of marriage.... Sophie Arnoult, an actress famous for
[271]
the witty things she said, described the republican marriage as ‘the
sacrament of adultery.’”—Scott, vol. 1, ch. 17.
“Where also our Lord was crucified.” This specification of the
prophecy was also fulfilled by France. In no land had the spirit of
enmity against Christ been more strikingly displayed. In no country
had the truth encountered more bitter and cruel opposition. In the
persecution which France had visited upon the confessors of the gospel,
she had crucified Christ in the person of His disciples.
Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While
the Waldenses laid down their lives upon the mountains of Piedmont
“for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” similar