The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 282

make things go on as long as I am likely to live; after my death it may
be as it will.” It was in vain that the necessity of reform was urged. He
saw the evils, but had neither the courage nor the power to meet them.
The doom awaiting France was but too truly pictured in his indolent and
selfish answer, “After me, the deluge!”
By working upon the jealousy of the kings and the ruling classes,
Rome had influenced them to keep the people in bondage, well knowing
that the state would thus be weakened, and purposing by this means
to fasten both rulers and people in her thrall. With farsighted policy
she perceived that in order to enslave men effectually, the shackles must
be bound upon their souls; that the surest way to prevent them from
escaping their bondage was to render them incapable of freedom. A
thousandfold more terrible than the physical suffering which resulted
from her policy, was the moral degradation. Deprived of the Bible, and
abandoned to the teachings of bigotry and selfishness, the people were
shrouded in ignorance and superstition, and sunken in vice, so that they
were wholly unfitted for self-government.
But the outworking of all this was widely different from what Rome
had purposed. Instead of holding the masses in a blind submission to her
dogmas, her work resulted in making them infidels and revolutionists.
Romanism they despised as priestcraft. They beheld the clergy as a party
to their oppression. The only god they knew was the god of Rome; her
teaching was their only religion. They regarded her greed and cruelty as
the legitimate fruit of the Bible, and they would have none of it.
Rome had misrepresented the character of God and perverted His
requirements, and now men rejected both the Bible and its Author. She
had required a blind faith in her dogmas, under the pretended sanction
of the Scriptures. In the reaction, Voltaire and his associates cast aside
God’s word altogether and spread everywhere the poison of infidelity.
Rome had ground down the people under her iron heel; and now the
masses, degraded and brutalized, in their recoil from

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