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The Great Controversy 1888
The demonstration was ostensibly in honor of the “holy sacrament,”
an act of expiation for the insult put upon the mass by the protesters.
But beneath this pageant a deadly purpose was concealed. On arriving
opposite the house of a Lutheran, the betrayer made a sign, but no
word was uttered. The procession halted, the house was entered, the
family were dragged forth and chained, and the terrible company went
forward in search of fresh victims. “No house was spared, great or
small, not even the colleges of the University of Paris. Morin made
the whole city quake.” “The reign of terror had begun.”
The victims were put to death with cruel torture, it being specially
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ordered that the fire should be lowered, in order to prolong their agony.
But they died as conquerors. Their constancy was unshaken, their
peace unclouded. Their persecutors, powerless to move their inflexible
firmness, felt themselves defeated. “The scaffolds were distributed
over all the quarters of Paris, and the burnings followed on successive
days, the design being to spread the terror of heresy by spreading
the executions. The advantage, however, in the end, remained with
the gospel. All Paris was enabled to see what kind of men the new
opinions could produce. There is no pulpit like the martyr’s pile. The
serene joy that lighted up the faces of these men as they passed along
to the place of execution, their heroism as they stood amid the bitter
flames, their meek forgiveness of injuries, transformed, in instances
not a few, anger into pity, and hate into love, and pleaded with resistless
eloquence in behalf of the gospel.”
The priests, bent upon keeping the popular fury at its height, cir-
culated the most terrible accusations against the Protestants. They
were charged with plotting to massacre the Catholics, to overthrow
the government, and to murder the king. Not a shadow of evidence
could be produced in support of the allegations. Yet these prophecies
of evil were to have a fulfillment; under far different circumstances,
however, and from causes of an opposite character. The cruelties that
were inflicted upon the innocent Protestants by the Catholics accumu-
lated in a weight of retribution, and in after-centuries wrought the very
doom they had predicted to be impending, upon the king, his govern-
ment, and subjects; but it was brought about by infidels, and by the
papists themselves. It was not the establishment, but the suppression
of Protestantism, that, three hundred years later, was to bring upon
France these dire calamities.