France and the United States by W. W. P.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 16, 1909

France and the United States

By W. W. P.

Two Periods of History Contrasted

In this time when there is such a tendency to exalt reason above revelation, a lesson from history may be profitable. We go back only a little more than one century to the frightful scenes of the French Revolution. The seeds of infidelity had been sown broadcast throughout the kingdom. In the effort to break the yoke of the monarchy a false idea of liberty was fostered—a revolt from all restraint. The success of the Revolution made its leaders almost insane in their endeavor to obliterate the religion of the Bible, and the execution of Louis XVI led on to the crucifixion of Christianity and to the deification of Reason. The story is told by H. H. Northrop, in “The History of the French Revolution,” from which we make the following quotation:—

The Convention decreed the service and worship of Reason alone. On the twentieth of December [1793] the new worship, of human vanity adoring itself, was inaugurated at Notre Dame. The Convention, the Commune, and all the authorities of Paris marched amid the sound of cannons, beating of drums, and martial strains, to the cathedral. A great throne had been erected in the nave. An actress, and it is said a prostitute, was borne in upon the shoulders of several men. She was Mademoiselle Maillard. The seat which she occupied was composed of oak branches. She was dressed as the Goddess of Reason. The atheists shouted with joy, while clubs, societies, fraternities, and female bands danced in hideous orgies around this new idol. Ancient pagan rites and ceremonies were restored to celebrate the reign of Reason. The dancing infidels raised before this new goddess a vast torch as emblematic of the light of philosophy. Pages knelt and waved incense prepared by Chaumette at her feet. The whole assemblage defied and mocked the name and worship of God, while hymns of liberty rent the air. In this way was the reign of the guillotine inaugurated. The terrorized Bishop Gobel was compelled to be present. Trembling and subdued, he could not prevent the tears rolling down his aged cheeks at the awful profanations and indecencies which he beheld. The same horrible mockeries through the power of the atheistic republic, were enacted throughout France, though Robespierre and Danton took no part in these scenes. The madness and anarchy of the people under the rule of the committees, the Commune, and the temporary sway of Hébert, now became yet more excessive. Not satisfied with prisons full of their enemies, as they termed them, and the daily falling of heads under the knife of murder, the anarchists resolved to profane the graves of the historic dead of France. What a spectacle of license and blind hatred!

The Convention decreed the destruction of the tombs of the kings of France in St. Denis. The Commune changed the decree into digging up the dead, casting away their bones, and out of their leaden coffins molding bullets. Could fanaticism go further? The beautiful gates of bronze in the church of St. Denis were broken up by the ax. Those gates had been presented to the church a thousand years before, by the great Emperor Charlemagne. Gratings, decorations, roofing, historic statues, all were dashed to pieces. Crumbling flesh, bones, skulls of kings, of queens, of princes, of the great warriors and statesmen, and bishops of the past, were dragged from their resting-places of centuries, and cast, profaned and pulverized, into the common sewers. . . . With every excess of atheistic and demoniac hatred and contempt, revolutionary France sought in wild frenzy to obliterate all vestiges of her historical and monarchical past.

Such insanity of revolution was never before manifested, and never since. Jacobin Paris and France, in 1793, alone present such a revolting spectacle. Atheism, dethroning God and destroying his churches and worship, endeavored to obliterate the resurrection by annihilating the dead of the past great ages.

The eye of God was on it all. The ear of God heard it all. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” and only a few months were to pass before Chaumette and Hébert, Danton and Desmoulins, even Robespierre and Couthon, the whole dreadful band of atheistic or deistic tyrants, were to realize this truth.—Pages 534-536.

At the very time when France was indulging in these excesses of atheism, the new republic, the United States, was just “coming up out of the earth.” Familiar with the direful results of a union of church and state in the Old World, the builders of this nation, with a true appreciation of the rights of conscience and the essence of true religion as a voluntary service, left the church free from the control of the state. The results have abundantly justified this action, and this republic has set an example to the nations of the world.

There are now, however, strong indications of a change in this wise policy, and we may again draw the contrast between France and the United States. After a century under the concordat made with the pope by Napoleon in 1801, France has repudiated this old bond between the state and the church, and is now giving equal opportunity to all forms of religious belief. At the same time an influential body of religious teachers in this country is clamoring for a union of religion with the state, while other leaders of thought are refusing to accept revealed truth, and are making reason their guide in the search for truth, and philosophy their interpreter.

What will be the outcome? Will this nation follow in the footsteps of the

France of 1789-95? Will the terrible lessons of that period of history be disregarded? Will Christianity again be crucified? It is time to spread the warning message, and to call upon all dwellers upon the earth to “fear God, and give glory to him.” Reason should be subject to revelation. W. W. P.