The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 273

knees in prayer. Hundreds of aged men, defenseless women, and
innocent children were left dead upon the earth at their place of meeting.
In traversing the mountainside or the forest, where they had been
accustomed to assemble, it was not unusual to find “at every four paces,
dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging suspended from the
trees.” Their country, laid waste with the sword, the ax, the fagot, “was
converted into one vast, gloomy wilderness.” “These atrocities were
enacted ... in no dark age, but in the brilliant era of Louis XIV. Science
was then cultivated, letters flourished, the divines of the court and of the
capital were learned and eloquent men, and greatly affected the graces
of meekness and charity.”—Ibid., b. 22, ch. 7.
But blackest in the black catalogue of crime, most horrible among
the fiendish deeds of all the dreadful centuries, was the St. Bartholomew
Massacre. The world still recalls with shuddering horror the scenes of
t hat most cowardly and cruel onslaught. The king of France, urged on
by Romish priests and prelates, lent his sanction to the dreadful work. A
bell, tolling at dead of night, was a signal for the slaughter. Protestants
by thousands, sleeping quietly in their homes, trusting to the plighted
honor of their king, were dragged forth without a warning and murdered
in cold blood.
As Christ was the invisible leader of His people from Egyptian
bondage, so was Satan the unseen leader of his subjects in this horrible
work of multiplying martyrs. For seven days the massacre was continued
in Paris, the first three with inconceivable fury. And it was not confined
to the city itself, but by special order of the king was extended to all
the provinces and towns where Protestants were found. Neither age nor
sex was respected. Neither the innocent babe nor the man of gray hairs
was spared. Noble and peasant, old and young, mother and child, were
cut down together. Throughout France the butchery continued for two
months. Seventy thousand of the very flower of the nation perished.
“When the news of the massacre reached Rome, the

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