Bible and the French Revolution
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prisons, once crowded with Huguenots, were now filled with their
persecutors. Chained to the bench and toiling at the oar, the Roman
Catholic clergy experienced all those woes which their church had so
freely inflicted on the gentle heretics.”
“Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man
could greet his neighbors, or say his prayers ... without danger of
committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner; when
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the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the jails
were filled as close as the holds of a slave-ship; when the gutters ran
foaming with blood into the Seine.... While the daily wagon-loads
of victims were carried to their doom through the streets of Paris,
the proconsuls, whom the sovereign committee had sent forth to the
departments, reveled in an extravagance of cruelty unknown even in
the capital. The knife of the deadly machine rose and fell too slow
for their work of slaughter. Long rows of captives were mowed down
with grape-shot. Holes were made in the bottom of crowded barges.
Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even the cruel mercy of a
speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, from
Saumur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted on naked
corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was shown
to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of seventeen
who were murdered by that execrable government is to be reckoned by
hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike
along the Jacobin ranks.” In the short space of ten years, millions of
human beings perished.
All this was as Satan would have it. This was what for ages he had
been working to secure. His policy is deception from first to last, and
his steadfast purpose is to bring woe and wretchedness upon men, to
deface and defile the workmanship of God, to mar the divine purposes
of benevolence and love, and thus cause grief in Heaven. Then by his
deceptive arts he blinds the minds of men, and leads them to throw
back the blame of his work upon God, as if all this misery were the
result of the Creator’s plan. In like manner, when those who have
been degraded and brutalized through his cruel power achieve their
freedom, he urges them on to excesses and atrocities. Then this picture
of unbridled license is pointed out by tyrants and oppressors as an
illustration of the results of liberty.
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