The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 271

born and educated in civilization, and assuming the right to govern
one of the finest of the European nations, uplift their united voice to
deny the most solemn truth which man’s soul receives, and renounce
unanimously the belief and worship of a Deity.”—Sir Walter Scott, Life
of Napoleon, vol. 1, ch. 17. “France is the only nation in the world
concerning which the authentic record survives, that as a nation she lifted
her hand in open rebellion against the Author of the universe. Plenty
of blasphemers, plenty of infidels, there have been, and still continue
to be, in England, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere; but France stands
apart in the world’s history as the single state which, by the decree of
her Legislative Assembly, pronounced that there was no God, and of
which the entire population of the capital, and a vast majority elsewhere,
women as well as men, danced and sang with joy in accepting the
announcement.”—Blackwood’s Magazine, November, 1870.
France presented also the characteristics which especially distinguished
Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state of moral
debasement and corruption similar to that which brought destruction
upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents together the
atheism and the licentiousness of France, as given in the prophecy:
“Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which
reduced the union of marriage—the most sacred engagement which
human beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most
strongly to the consolidation of society—to the state of a mere civil
contract of a transitory character, which any two persons might engage
in and cast loose at pleasure.... If fiends had set themselves to work to
discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable,
graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same
time an assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create
should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not
have invented a more effectual plan that the degradation of marriage....
Sophie Arnoult, an

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