ulers
and people in her thrall. With far-sighted 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 her tyranny, cast off all restraint.
Enraged at the glittering cheat to which they had so long paid homage,
they rejected truth and falsehood together; and mistaking license for
liberty, the slaves of vice exulted in their imagined freedom.

At the opening of the Revolution, by a concession of the king, the people
were granted a representation exceeding that of the nobles and the clergy
combined. Thus the balance of power was in their hands; but they were not
prepared to use it with wisdom and moderation. Eager to redress the wrongs
they had suffered, they determined to undertake the reconstruction of
society. An outraged populace, whose minds were filled with bitter and
long-treasured memories of wrong, resolved to revolutionize the state of
misery that had grown unbearable, and to revenge themselves upon those
whom they regarded as the authors of their sufferings. The oppressed
wrought out t