Bible and the French Revolution
237
were murdered by that execrable government, is to be reckoned by
hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike
along the Jacobin ranks.” (See Appendix.) In the short space of ten
years, multitudes of human beings perished.
All this was as Satan would have it. This was what for ages he had
been working to secure. His policy is deception from first to last, and
his steadfast purpose is to bring woe and wretchedness upon men, to
deface and defile the workmanship of God, to mar the divine purposes
of benevolence and love, and thus cause grief in heaven. Then by his
deceptive arts he blinds the minds of men, and leads them to throw
back the blame of his work upon God, as if all this misery were the
result of the Creator’s plan. In like manner, when those who have
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been degraded and brutalized through his cruel power achieve their
freedom, he urges them on to excesses and atrocities. Then this picture
of unbridled license is pointed out by tyrants and oppressors as an
illustration of the results of liberty.
When error in one garb has been detected, Satan only masks it in a
different disguise, and multitudes receive it as eagerly as at the first.
When the people found Romanism to be a deception, and he could not
through this agency lead them to transgression of God’s law, he urged
them to regard all religion as a cheat, and the Bible as a fable; and,
casting aside the divine statutes, they gave themselves up to unbridled
iniquity.
The fatal error which wrought such woe for the inhabitants of
France was the ignoring of this one great truth: that true freedom
lies within the proscriptions of the law of God. “O that thou hadst
hearkened to My commandments! then had thy peace been as a river,
and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea.” “There is no peace,
saith the Lord, unto the wicked.” “But whoso hearkeneth unto Me shall
dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.”
Isaiah 48:18, 22
;
Proverbs 1:33
.
Atheists, infidels, and apostates oppose and denounce God’s law;
but the results of their influence prove that the well-being of man is
bound up with his obedience of the divine statutes. Those who will
not read the lesson from the book of God are bidden to read it in the
history of nations.
When Satan wrought through the Roman Church to lead men
away from obedience, his agency was concealed, and his work was