The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 285

“Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbors or say his prayers ... without danger of committing a
capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner; when the guillotine was
long and hard at work every morning; when the jails were filled as close
as the holds of a slave ship; when the gutters ran foaming with blood into
the Seine.... While the daily wagonloads of victims were carried to their
doom through the streets of Paris, the proconsuls, whom the sovereign
committee had sent forth to the departments, reveled in an extravagance
of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the deadly machine
rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long rows of captives
were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the bottom of
crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even the
cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down the
Loire, from Saumur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites feasted
on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy was
shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of seventeen
who were murdered by that execrable government, is to be reckoned by
hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike
along the Jacobin ranks.” (See Appendix.) In the short space of ten
years, multitudes of human beings perished.
All this was as Satan would have it. This was what for ages he had
been working to secure. His policy is deception from first to last, and
his steadfast purpose is to bring woe and wretchedness upon men, to
deface and defile the workmanship of God, to mar the divine purposes
of benevolence and love, and thus cause grief in heaven. Then by his
deceptive arts he blinds the minds of men, and leads them to throw back
the blame of his work upon God, as if all this misery were the result of
the Creator’s plan. In like manner, when

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