The European Union in Prophecy The EU in Prophecy I | Page 220

The European Union in Prophecy
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,
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