By working upon the jealousy of the kings and the ruling classes , Rome had influenced them to keep the people in bondage , well knowing that the state would thus be weakened , and purposing by this means to fasten both rulers and people in her thrall . With farsighted policy she perceived that in order to enslave men effectually , the shackles must be bound upon their souls ; that the surest way to prevent them from escaping their bondage was to render them incapable of freedom . A thousandfold more terrible than the physical suffering which resulted from her policy , was the moral degradation . Deprived of the 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 submission 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 .
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 avenge 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 its first guillotine . On the very spot where the first martyrs to the Protestant faith were burned in the sixteenth century ,
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