The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 280

“But a blind and inexorable bigotry chased from her soil every
teacher of virtue, every champion of order, every honest defender of
the throne; it said to the men who would have made their country a
‘renown and glory’ in the earth, Choose which you will have, a stake or
exile. At last the ruin of the state was complete; there remained no more
conscience to be proscribed; no more religion to be dragged to the stake;
no more patriotism to be chased into banishment.”—Wylie, b. 13, ch.
20. And the Revolution, with all its horrors, was the dire result.
“With the flight of the Huguenots a general decline settled upon
France. Flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay; fertile districts
returned to their native wildness; intellectual dullness and moral
declension succeeded a period of unwonted progress. Paris became
one vast almshouse, and it is estimated that, at the breaking out of
the Revolution, two hundred thousand paupers claimed charity from the
hands of the king. The Jesuits alone flourished in the decaying nation,
and ruled with dreadful tyranny over churches and schools, the prisons
and the galleys.”
The gospel would have brought to France the solution of those
political and social problems that baffled the skill of her clergy, her king,
and her legislators, and finally plunged the nation into anarchy and ruin.
But under the domination of Rome the people had lost the Saviour’s
blessed lessons of self-sacrifice and unselfish love. They had been led
away from the practice of self-denial for the good of others. The rich
had found no rebuke for their oppression of the poor, the poor no help
for their servitude and degradation. The selfishness of the wealthy and
powerful grew more and more apparent and oppressive. For centuries the
greed and profligacy of the noble resulted in grinding extortion toward
the peasant. The rich wronged the poor, and the poor hated the rich.
In many provinces the estates were held by the nobles, and the
laboring classes were only tenants; they were at the mercy

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