The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 272

actress famous for the witty things she said, described the republican
marriage as ‘the sacrament of adultery.”’—Scott, vol. 1, ch. 17.
“Where also our Lord was crucified.” This specification of the
prophecy was also fulfilled by France. In no land had the spirit of enmity
against Christ been more strikingly displayed. In no country had the
truth encountered more bitter and cruel opposition. In the persecution
which France had visited upon the confessors of the gospel, she had
crucified Christ in the person of His disciples.
Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While
the Waldenses laid down their lives upon the mountains of Piedmont
“for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” similar
witness to the truth had been borne by their brethren, the Albigenses of
France. In the days of the Reformation its disciples had been put to death
with horrible tortures. King and nobles, highborn women and delicate
maidens, the pride and chivalry of the nation, had feasted their eyes upon
the agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots, battling for
those rights which the human heart holds most sacred, had poured out
their blood on many a hard-fought field. The Protestants were counted
as outlaws, a price was set upon their heads, and they were hunted down
like wild beasts.
The “Church in the Desert,” the few descendants of the ancient
Christians that still lingered in France in the eighteenth century, hiding
away in the mountains of the south, still cherished the faith of their
fathers. As they ventured to meet by night on mountainside or lonely
moor, they were chased by dragoons and dragged away to lifelong
slavery in the galleys. The purest, the most refined, and the most
intelligent of the French were chained, in horrible torture, amidst robbers
and assassins. (See Wylie, b. 22, ch. 6.) Others, more mercifully dealt
with, were shot down in cold blood, as, unarmed and helpless, they fell
upon their

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