234
The Great Controversy
To the warnings of his counselors the king was accustomed to reply:
“Try to make things go on as long as I am likely to live; after my death
[281]
it may be as it will.” It was in vain that the necessity of reform was
urged. He saw the evils, but had neither the courage nor the power to
meet them. The doom awaiting France was but too truly pictured in
his indolent and selfish answer, “After me, the deluge!”
By working upon the jealousy of the kings and the ruling classes,
Rome had influenced them to keep the people in bondage, well know-
ing that the state would thus be weakened, and purposing by this means
to fasten both rulers and people in her thrall. With farsighted policy she
perceived that in order to enslave men effectually, the shackles must
be bound upon their souls; that the surest way to prevent them from
escaping their bondage was to render them incapable of freedom. A
thousandfold more terrible than the physical suffering which resulted
from her policy, was the moral degradation. Deprived of the Bible,
and abandoned to the teachings of bigotry and selfishness, the people
were shrouded in ignorance and superstition, and sunken in vice, so
that they were wholly unfitted for self-government.
But the outworking of all this was widely different from what
Rome had purposed. Instead of holding the masses in a blind submis-
sion to her dogmas, her work resulted in making them infidels and
revolutionists. Romanism they despised as priestcraft. They beheld the
clergy as a party to their oppression. The only god they knew was the
god of Rome; her teaching was their only religion. They regarded her
greed and cruelty as the legitimate fruit of the Bible, and they would
have none of it.
Rome had misrepresented the character of God and perverted His
requirements, and now men rejected both the Bible and its Author.
She had required a blind faith in her dogmas, under the pretended
sanction of the Scriptures. In the reaction, Voltaire and his associates
cast aside God’s word altogether and spread everywhere the poison
of infidelity. Rome had ground down the people under her iron heel;
and now the masses, degraded and brutalized, in their recoil from
[282]
her tyranny, cast off all restraint. Enraged at the glittering cheat to
which they had so long paid homage, they rejected truth and falsehood
together; and mistaking license for liberty, the slaves of vice exulted
in their imagined freedom.