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France’s Reign of Terror: Its True Cause
159
See
Isaiah 32:17
. He who obeys the divine law will most truly
respect and obey the laws of the country. France prohibited the
Bible. Century after century men of integrity, of intellectual and
moral strength, who had the faith to suffer for truth, toiled as slaves
in the galleys, perished at the stake, or rotted in dungeon cells.
Thousands found safety in flight for 250 years after the opening of
the Reformation.
“Scarcely was there a generation of Frenchmen during that long
period that did not witness the disciples of the gospel fleeing before
the insane fury of the persecutor, and carrying with them the intel-
ligence, the arts, the industry, the order, in which, as a rule, they
pre-eminently excelled, to enrich the lands in which they found an
[174]
asylum. ... If all that was now driven away had been retained in
France, what a ... great, prosperous, and happy country—a pattern
to the nations—would she have been! But a blind and inexorable
bigotry chased from her soil every teacher of virtue, every champion
of order, every honest defender of the throne. ... At last the ruin of
the state was complete.
The Revolution with its horrors was the
result.
What Might Have Been
“With the flight of the Huguenots a general decline settled upon
France. Flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay. ... It is
estimated that, at the breaking out of the Revolution, two hundred
thousand paupers in Paris claimed charity from the hands of the
king. The Jesuits alone flourished in the decaying nation.
The gospel would have brought to France the solution of those
problems that baffled her clergy, king, and legislators, and finally
plunged the nation into ruin. But under Rome the people had lost
the Saviour’s lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love for the good
of others. The rich had no rebuke for the oppression of the poor; the
poor no help for their degradation. The selfishness of the wealthy
and powerful grew more and more oppressive. For centuries, the
rich wronged the poor, and the poor hated the rich.
10
Wylie, bk. 13, ch. 20.
11
Ibid.