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The Great Controversy
witness to the truth had been borne by their brethren, the Albigenses
of France. In the days of the Reformation its disciples had been put to
death with horrible tortures. King and nobles, highborn women and
delicate maidens, the pride and chivalry of the nation, had feasted their
eyes upon the agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots,
battling for those rights which the human heart holds most sacred, had
poured out their blood on many a hard-fought field. The Protestants
were counted as outlaws, a price was set upon their heads, and they
were hunted down like wild beasts.
The “Church in the Desert,” the few descendants of the ancient
Christians that still lingered in France in the eighteenth century, hiding
away in the mountains of the south, still cherished the faith of their
fathers. As they ventured to meet by night on mountainside or lonely
moor, they were chased by dragoons and dragged away to lifelong
slavery in the galleys. The purest, the most refined, and the most intel-
ligent of the French were chained, in horrible torture, amidst robbers
and assassins. (See Wylie, b. 22, ch. 6.) Others, more mercifully dealt
with, were shot down in cold blood, as, unarmed and helpless, they
fell upon their knees in prayer. Hundreds of aged men, defenseless
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women, and innocent children were left dead upon the earth at their
place of meeting. In traversing the mountainside or the forest, where
they had been accustomed to assemble, it was not unusual to find “at
every four paces, dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging
suspended from the trees.” Their country, laid waste with the sword,
the ax, the fagot, “was converted into one vast, gloomy wilderness.”
“These atrocities were enacted ... in no dark age, but in the brilliant
era of Louis XIV. Science was then cultivated, letters flourished, the
divines of the court and of the capital were learned and eloquent men,
and greatly affected the graces of meekness and charity.”—Ibid., b. 22,
ch. 7.
But blackest in the black catalogue of crime, most horrible
among the fiendish deeds of all the dreadful centuries, was the St.
Bartholomew Massacre. The world still recalls with shuddering horror
the scenes of that most cowardly and cruel onslaught. The king of
France, urged on by Romish priests and prelates, lent his sanction to
the dreadful work. A bell, tolling at dead of night, was a signal for the
slaughter. Protestants by thousands, sleeping quietly in their homes,