The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 227

concealed. On arriving opposite the house of a Lutheran, the betrayer
made a sign, but no word was uttered. The procession halted, the house
was entered, the family were dragged forth and chained, and the terrible
company went forward in search of fresh victims. They “spared no
house, great or small, not even the colleges of the University of Paris....
Morin made all the city quake.... It was a reign of terror.”—Ibid., b. 4,
ch. 10.
The victims were put to death with cruel torture, it being specially
ordered that the fire should be lowered in order to prolong their agony.
But they died as conquerors. Their constancy were unshaken, their
peace unclouded. Their persecutors, powerless to move their inflexible
firmness, felt themselves defeated. “The scaffolds were distributed
over all the quarters of Paris, and the burnings followed on successive
days, the design being to spread the terror of heresy by spreading the
executions. The advantage, however, in the end, remained with the
gospel. All Paris was enabled to see what kind of men the new opinions
could produce. There was no pulpit like the martyr’s pile. The serene
joy that lighted up the faces of these men as they passed along ... to the
place of execution, their heroism as they stood amid the bitter flames,
their meek forgiveness of injuries, transformed, in instances not a few,
anger into pity, and hate into love, and pleaded with resistless eloquence
in behalf of the gospel.”—Wylie, b. 13, ch. 20.
The priests, bent upon keeping the popular fury at its height,
circulated the most terrible accusations against the Protestants. They
were charged with plotting to massacre the Catholics, to overthrow the
government, and to murder the king. Not a shadow of evidence could be
produced in support of the allegations. Yet these prophecies of evil were
to have a fulfillment; under far different circumstances, however, and
from causes of an opposite character. The cruelties that were inflicted
upon the innocent Protestants by the Catholics accumulated in a weight
of retribution, and in after centuries wrought the very doom they had
predicted to be impending, upon the king, his government, and his

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