Instead of keeping the common people in blind submission to her teachings, Rome's work resulted in making them infidels and revolutionists. They despised Romanism as priestly deceptions. But the only god they knew was the god of Rome. They believed Rome's greed and cruelty were the fruit of the Bible, and they would have none of it.LF 119.2

Rome had misrepresented God's character, and now people rejected both the Bible and its Author. In the reaction, Voltaire and his associates threw God's Word completely aside and spread their anti-Christian teachings. Rome had ground the people down under her iron heel, and now the people threw off all restraint. Enraged, they rejected truth and falsehood together.LF 119.3

At the opening of the Revolution, the king reluctantly granted the people more political representation than that of the nobles and clergy combined. So the balance of power was in their hands, but they were not prepared to use it wisely and with moderation. The angry citizens were determined to revenge themselves. The oppressed carried out the lesson they had learned under tyranny and became the oppressors of those who had oppressed them.LF 119.4

France reaped a harvest in blood from her submission to Rome. Where France, under Romanism, had set up the first stake at the opening of the Reformation, there the Revolution set up its first guillotine. On the spot where the first martyrs of the Protestant faith were burned in the sixteenth century, the first victims were guillotined in the eighteenth. When the nation threw off the restraints of God's law, it swept on to revolt and anarchy. The war against the Bible stands in world history as the Reign of Terror. Whoever triumphed today was condemned tomorrow.LF 119.5

King, clergy, and nobles were forced to submit to the atrocities of a maddened people. Those who decreed the death of the king soon followed him to the scaffold. A general slaughter was decreed against anyone suspected of hostility to the Revolution. France became a vast field for rival masses of people, swayed by the fury of their passions. “In Paris one riot followed another, and the citizens were divided into an assortment of factions that seemed intent on nothing but exterminating each other.... The country was nearly bankrupt, the armies were clamoring for back pay, the people of Paris were starving, the provinces were laid waste by armed robbers, and civilization was almost extinguished in anarchy and unrestrained immorality.”LF 119.6

All too well the people had learned the lessons of cruelty and torture that Rome had taught so diligently. This time it was not the disciples of Jesus that were dragged to the stake. Long ago these had died or been driven into exile. “The scaffolds ran red with the blood of the priests. The galleys and the prisons, once crowded with Huguenots, were now filled with their persecutors. Chained to the bench and laboring at the oar, the Roman Catholic priests experienced all the suffering that their church had inflicted so freely on the gentle heretics.” (See Appendix.)LF 120.1

“Then came those days ... when spies lurked in every corner, when the guillotine was at work long and hard every morning, when the jails were packed as tightly as the holds of a slave ship, when the gutters ran foaming with blood into the Seine River.... Long rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot from cannons. Holes were made in the bottom of crowded barges.... Hundreds of young boys and of girls of seventeen were murdered by that repulsive government. Soldiers tore babies from the breast and tossed them from spear to spear along their ranks.” (See Appendix.)LF 120.2

All this was just as Satan wanted it. His policy is deception, and his purpose is to bring wretchedness on humanity, to deface the workmanship of God, and to mar the divine purpose of love, all to cause grief in heaven. Then by his deceptive arts, he leads people to throw the blame on God, as if all this misery were the result of the Creator's plan. When the people found Romanism to be a deception, he urged them to regard all religion as a cheat and the Bible as a fable.LF 120.3

What Might Have Been

The Fatal Error