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From Here to Forever
In many provinces the laboring classes were at the mercy of
landlords and were forced to submit to exhorbitant demands. The
middle and lower classes were heavily taxed by the civil authorities
and clergy. “The farmers and the peasants might starve, for aught
their oppressors cared. ... The lives of the agricultural laborers were
lives of incessant work and unrelieved misery; their complaints ...
were treated with insolent contempt. ... Bribes were notoriously
accepted by the judges. ... Of the taxes, ... not half ever found its
way into the royal or episcopal treasury; the rest was squandered in
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profligate self-indulgence. And the men who thus impoverished their
fellow-subjects were themselves exempt from taxation and entitled
by law or custom to all the appointments of the state. ... For their
gratification millions were condemned to hopeless and degrading
lives.”
For more than half a century before the Revolution the throne
was occupied by Louis XV, distinguished as an indolent, frivolous,
and sensual monarch. With the state financially embarrassed and the
people exasperated, it needed no prophet’s eye to foresee a terrible
outbreak. In vain the necessity of reform was urged. The doom
awaiting France was pictured in the king’s selfish answer, “After me,
the deluge!”
Rome had influenced the kings and ruling classes to keep the
people in bondage, purposing to fasten both rulers and people in
her shackles upon their souls. A thousandfold more terrible than
the physical suffering which resulted from her policy was the moral
degradation. Deprived of the Bible, and abandoned to selfishness,
the people were shrouded in ignorance and sunken in vice, wholly
unfitted for self-government.
Results Reaped in Blood
Instead of holding the masses in blind submission to her dogmas,
Rome’s work resulted in making them infidels and revolutionists.
Romanism they despised as priestcraft. The only god they knew was
the god of Rome. They regarded her greed and cruelty as the fruit of
the Bible, and they would have none of it.
Rome had misrepresented the character of God, and now men
rejected both the Bible and its Author. In the reaction, Voltaire and