the Bible strengthening the
intellect and governing the conscience of her people, what a glory would
at this day have encompassed France! What a great, prosperous, and happy
country--a pattern to the nations--would she have been!

"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."(414) 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 dulness 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 of their landlords, and
were forced to submit to their exorbitant demands. The burden of
supporting both the church and the state fell upon the middle and lower
classes, who were heavily taxed by the civil authorit