Enmity Against Christ

“Where also our Lord was crucified.” This was also fulfilled by France. In no country had the truth encountered more cruel opposition. In the persecution visited upon the confessors of the gospel France had crucified Christ in the person of His disciples.HF 169.1

Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While the Waldenses laid down their lives on the mountains of Piedmont “for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” similar witness had been borne by the Albigenses of France. The disciples of the Reformation had been put to death with horrible tortures. King and nobles, highborn women and delicate maidens had feasted their eyes on the agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots had poured out their blood on many a hard-fought field, hunted down like wild beasts.HF 169.2

The few descendants of the ancient Christians that still lingered in France in the eighteenth century, hiding away in the mountains of the south, cherished the faith of their fathers. They were dragged away to lifelong slavery in the galleys. The most refined and intelligent of the French were chained, in horrible torture, amidst robbers and assassins. Others were shot down in cold blood as they fell upon their knees in prayer. Their country, laid waste with the sword, the axe, 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.”^{3Wylie, bk. 22, ch. 7.}HF 169.3