Bible and the French Revolution
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“But a blind and inexorable bigotry chased from her soil every
teacher of virtue, every champion of order, every honest defender of
the throne; it said to the men who would have made their country a
‘renown and glory’ in the earth, Choose which you will have, a stake
or exile. At last the ruin of the State was complete; there remained no
more conscience to be proscribed; no more religion to be dragged to
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the stake; no more patriotism to be chased into banishment.” And the
Revolution, with all its horrors, was the dire result.
“With the flight of the Huguenots a general decline settled upon
France. Flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay; fertile dis-
tricts returned to their native wildness; intellectual dullness and moral
declension succeeded a period of unwonted progress. Paris became
one vast almshouse, and it is estimated that, at the breaking out of the
Revolution, two hundred thousand paupers claimed charity from the
hands of the king. The Jesuits alone flourished in the decaying nation,
and ruled with dreadful tyranny over churches and schools, the prisons
and the galleys.”
The gospel would have brought to France the solution of those
political and social problems that baffled the skill of her clergy, her
king, and her legislators, and finally plunged the nation into anarchy
and ruin. But under the domination of Rome, the people had lost the
Saviour’s blessed lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love. They had
been led away from the practice of self-denial for the good of others.
The rich had found no rebuke for their oppression of the poor, the poor
no help for their servitude and degradation. The selfishness of the
wealthy and powerful grew more and more apparent and oppressive.
For centuries the greed and profligacy of the noble resulted in grinding
extortion toward the peasant. The rich wronged the poor, and the poor
hated the rich.
In many provinces the estates were held by the nobles, and the
laboring classes were only tenants; they were at the mercy of their
landlords, and were forced to submit to their exorbitant demands. The
burden of supporting both the Church and the State fell upon the mid-
dle and lower classes, who were heavily taxed by the civil authorities
and by the clergy. “The pleasure of the nobles was considered the
supreme law; the farmers and the peasants might starve, for aught
their oppressors cared.... The people were compelled at every turn to
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consult the exclusive interest of the landlord. The lives of the agri-