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Chapter 15—France’s Reign of Terror: Its True
Cause
Some nations welcomed the Reformation as a messenger of
Heaven. In other lands the light of Bible knowledge was almost
wholly excluded. In one country truth and error struggled for cen-
turies for the mastery. At last the truth of Heaven was thrust out.
The restraint of God’s Spirit was removed from a people that had
despised the gift of His grace. And all the world saw the fruit of
wilful rejection of light.
The war against the Bible in France culminated in the Revolution,
the legitimate result of Rome’s suppression of the Scriptures.
It presented the most striking illustration ever witnessed
of the working out of the teaching of the Roman Church.
The Revelator points to the terrible results that were to accrue
especially to France from the domination of the “man of sin”:
“The holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.
And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall proph-
esy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sack-
cloth. ... And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast
that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them,
and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall
lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom
and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. ... And they that dwell
upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall
send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented
them that dwelt on the earth. And after three days and a half the
Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their
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feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them.”
Revelation
11:2-11
.
The “forty and two months” and “a thousand two hundred and
threescore days” are the same, the time in which the church of Christ
was to suffer oppression from Rome. The 1260 years began in
A.D. 538 and terminated in 1798.
At that time a
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