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The Great Controversy
excelled, to enrich the lands in which they found an asylum. And in
proportion as they replenished other countries with these good gifts, did
they empty their own of them. If all that was now driven away had been
retained in France; if, during these three hundred years, the industrial
skill of the exiles had been cultivating her soil; if, during these three
hundred years, their artistic bent had been improving her manufactures;
if, during these three hundred years, their creative genius and analytic
power had been enriching her literature and cultivating her science;
if their wisdom had been guiding her councils, their bravery fighting
her battles, their equity framing her laws, and the religion of the Bible
strengthening the intellect and governing the conscience of her people,
what a glory would at this day have encompassed France! What a
great, prosperous, and happy country—a pattern to the nations—would
she have been!
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“But a blind and inexorable bigotry chased from her soil every
teacher of virtue, every champion of order, every honest defender of
the throne; it said to the men who would have made their country a
‘renown and glory’ in the earth, Choose which you will have, a stake
or exile. At last the ruin of the state was complete; there remained no
more conscience to be proscribed; no more religion to be dragged to
the stake; no more patriotism to be chased into banishment.”—Wylie,
b. 13, ch. 20. And the Revolution, with all its horrors, was the dire
result.
“With the flight of the Huguenots a general decline settled upon
France. Flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay; fertile dis-
tricts returned to their native wildness; intellectual dullness and moral
declension succeeded a period of unwonted progress. Paris became
one vast almshouse, and it is estimated that, at the breaking out of the
Revolution, two hundred thousand paupers claimed charity from the
hands of the king. The Jesuits alone flourished in the decaying nation,
and ruled with dreadful tyranny over churches and schools, the prisons
and the galleys.”
The gospel would have brought to France the solution of those
political and social problems that baffled the skill of her clergy, her
king, and her legislators, and finally plunged the nation into anarchy
and ruin. But under the domination of Rome the people had lost the
Saviour’s blessed lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love. They had
been led away from the practice of self-denial for the good of others.