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The Great Controversy 1888
authentic record survives, that as a nation she lifted her hand in open
rebellion against the Author of the universe. Plenty of blasphemers,
plenty of infidels, there have been, and still continue to be, in England,
Germany, Spain, and elsewhere; but France stands apart in the world’s
history as the single State which, by the decree of her legislative
assembly, pronounced that there was no God, and of which the entire
population of the capital, and a vast majority elsewhere, women as well
as men, danced and sang with joy in accepting the announcement.”
France presented also the characteristic which especially distin-
guished Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state
of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought
destruction upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents
together the atheism and licentiousness of France, as it is given in the
prophecy: “Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion
was that which reduced the union of marriage—the most sacred en-
gagement which human beings can form, and the permanence of which
leads most strongly to the consolidation of society—to a state of mere
civil contract of a transitory character, which any two persons might
engage in and cast loose at pleasure.... If fiends had set themselves at
work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is
venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and obtaining at
the same time an assurance that the mischief which it was their object
to create should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they
could not have invented a more effectual plan than the degradation of
marriage.... Sophie Arnoult, an actress famous for the witty things she
said, described the republican marriage as the ‘sacrament of adultery.’”
[271]
“Where also our Lord was crucified.” This specification of the
prophecy was also fulfilled by France. In no land had the spirit of
enmity against Christ been more strikingly displayed. In no country
had the truth encountered more bitter and cruel opposition. In the
persecution which France had visited upon the confessors of the gospel,
she had crucified Christ in the person of his disciples.
Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While
the Waldenses laid down their lives upon the mountains of Piedmont
“for the Word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” similar
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, high-born women and