Bible and the French Revolution
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delicate maidens, the pride and chivalry of the nation, had feasted their
eyes upon the agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots,
battling for those rights which the human heart holds most sacred, had
poured out their blood on many a hard-fought field. The Protestants
were counted as outlaws, a price was set upon their heads, and they
were hunted down like wild beasts.
The “Church in the Desert,” the few descendants of the ancient
Christians that still lingered in France in the eighteenth century, hiding
away in the mountains of the south, still cherished the faith of their
fathers. As they ventured to meet by night on mountain-side or lonely
moor, they were chased by dragoons, and dragged away to life-long
slavery in the galleys. “The purest, the most refined, and the most
intelligent of the French, were chained, in horrible torture, amidst
robbers and assassins.” Others, more mercifully dealt with, were shot
down in cold blood, as, unarmed and helpless, they fell upon their
knees in prayer. Hundreds of aged men, defenseless women, and inno-
cent children were left dead upon the earth at their place of meeting.
In traversing the mountain-side or the forest, where they had been
accustomed to assemble, it was not unusual to find “at every four paces
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dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging suspended from
the trees.” Their country, “laid waste with the sword, the ax, the fagot,
was converted into a vast, gloomy wilderness.” These atrocities were
not committed during the Dark Ages, but in that brilliant era “when
science was cultivated, and letters flourished; when the divines of
the court and the capital were learned and eloquent men, who greatly
affected the graces of meekness and charity.”
But blackest in the black catalogue of crime, most horrible
among the fiendish deeds of all the dreadful centuries, was the St.
Bartholomew Massacre. The world still recalls with shuddering horror
the scenes of that most cowardly and cruel onslaught. The king of
France, urged on by Romish priests and prelates, lent his sanction to
the dreadful work. The great bell of the palace, tolling at dead of night,
was a signal for the slaughter. Protestants by thousands, sleeping qui-
etly in their homes, trusting to the plighted honor of their king, were
dragged forth without a warning, and murdered in cold blood.
Satan, in the person of the Roman zealots, led the van. As Christ
was the invisible leader of his people from Egyptian bondage, so
was Satan the unseen leader of his subjects in this horrible work of