Long rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot . 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 , multitudes 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 .
When error in one garb has been detected , Satan only masks it in a different disguise , and multitudes receive it as eagerly as at the first . When the people found Romanism to be a deception , and he could not through this agency lead them to transgression of God ' s law , he urged them to regard all religion as a cheat , and the Bible as a fable ; and , casting aside the divine statutes , they gave themselves up to unbridled iniquity .
The fatal error which wrought such woe for the inhabitants of France was the ignoring of this one great truth : that true freedom lies within the proscriptions of the law of God . " O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments ! then had thy peace been as a river , and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea ." " There is no peace , saith the Lord , unto the wicked ." " But whoso hearkeneth unto Me shall dwell safely , and shall be quiet from fear of evil ." Isaiah 48:18 , 22 ; Proverbs 1:33 . Atheists , infidels , and apostates oppose and denounce God ' s law ; but the results of their influence prove that the well-being of man is bound up with his obedience of the divine statutes . Those who will not read the lesson from the book of God are bidden to read it in the history of nations .
When Satan wrought through the Roman Church to lead men away from obedience , his agency was concealed , and his work was so disguised that the degradation and misery which resulted were not seen to be the fruit of transgression . And his power was so far counteracted by the working of the Spirit of God that his purposes were prevented from reaching their full fruition . The people did not trace the effect to its cause and discover the source of their miseries . But in the Revolution the law of God was openly set aside by the National Council . And in the Reign of Terror which followed , the working of cause and effect could be seen by all . When France publicly rejected
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