Bible and the French Revolution
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Bible, and abandoned to the teachings of bigotry and selfishness, the
people were shrouded in ignorance and superstition, and sunken in
vice, so that they were wholly unfitted for self-government.
But the outworking of all this was widely different from what
Rome had purposed. Instead of holding the masses in a blind submis-
sion to her dogmas, her work resulted in making them infidels and
revolutionists. Romanism they despised as priestcraft. They beheld the
clergy as a party to their oppression. The only god they knew was the
god of Rome; her teaching was their only religion. They regarded her
greed and cruelty as the legitimate fruit of the Bible and they would
have none of it.
Rome had misrepresented the character of God, and perverted his
requirements, and now men rejected both the Bible and its Author.
She had required a blind faith in her dogmas, under the pretended
sanction of the Scriptures. In the reaction, Voltaire and his associates
cast aside God’s Word altogether, and spread everywhere the poison
of infidelity. Rome had ground down the people under her iron heel;
and now the masses, degraded and brutalized, in their recoil from
her tyranny cast off all restraint. Enraged at the glittering cheat to
which they had so long paid homage, they rejected truth and falsehood
together; and mistaking license for liberty, the slaves of vice exulted
in their imagined freedom.
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At the opening of the Revolution, by a concession of the king, the
people were granted a representation exceeding that of the nobles and
the clergy combined. Thus the balance of power was in their hands; but
they were not prepared to use it with wisdom and moderation. Eager
to redress the wrongs they had suffered, they determined to undertake
the reconstruction of society. An outraged populace, whose minds
were filled with bitter and long-treasured memories of wrong, resolved
to revolutionize the state of misery that had grown unbearable, and
to revenge themselves upon those whom they regarded as the authors
of their sufferings. The oppressed wrought out the lesson they had
learned under tyranny, and became the oppressors of those who had
oppressed them.
Unhappy France reaped in blood the harvest she had sown. Terrible
were the results of her submission to the controlling power of Rome.
Where France, under the influence of Romanism, had set up the first
stake at the opening of the Reformation, there the Revolution set up