esteemed rather a virtue than a vice, and religious liberty proclaimed, the clergy of France were required to abjure all allegiance to the see of Rome, and that church was "deprived of its earthly power," or, the dominion forcibly taken from its hands. Even the benefits which France derived from the Revolution are associated with the record of the miseries of the priests.

*

"We might add," says Sir Walter Scott, "to the weight of benefits which France unquestionably owes to the Constituent Assembly, that they restored liberty of conscience by establishing universal toleration. But against this benefit must be set the violent imposition of the constitutional oath upon the Catholic clergy, which led afterwards to such horrible massacres of innocent and revered victims, murdered in defiance of those rules of toleration, which, rather in scorn of religion of any kind than regard to men's consciences, the Assembly had previously adopted. The National Assembly was victorious at once over altar and throne, mitre and coronet, kings, nobles, and clergy. According to the sentiments which they had avowed, they were in their hands as clay in that of the potter, to be used or thrown away at pleasure. The state of the expatriated French clergy, driven from their home, and deprived of their means of subsistence, because they refused an oath imposed contrary to their ecclesiastical vows, and to their conscience, added religious zeal to the general interest excited by the spectacle, yet NEW TO EUROPE, of thousands of nobility and clergy compelled to forsake their country, and take refuge among aliens."

A war of extermination had been waged in France, against the witnesses of Jesus; and there was no place of refuge within its boundaries, for those who had not the mark of the beast and disowned the spiritual supremacy of Rome. But the time was now come when the recognition, even by the priests, of the authority of the pope, was a crime which led to poverty and expatriation. An attempt to save the recusant priests from judicial banishment, was more than the worth of the crown or the life of the king of France.

* Life of Napoleon, vol. i. pp. 227, 254.

+ Ib. p. 289.

"A decree was passed by the Assembly, that such priests as might be convicted of a refusal to subscribe the oath to the civil Constitution should be liable to deportation. This was a point of conscience with Louis. On the decree against the priests, his resolution continued unmoved and immoveable. Thus religion, which had for half a century been so slightly regarded in France, at length interposed her influence in deciding the fate of the king and the kingdom.”*

That a noisome and grievous sore fell upon the men that had the mark of the beast, and upon them that worshipped his image, is a fact too notorious to bear any question, and was too awfully demonstrated, as the fearful recollection of living millions may attest, to stand in need of illustration. Yet that we may not altogether leave a chasm in prophetic history, even where the most awful lessons were given to the world, of the death-like character of infidelity, of the righteous avenging of the blood of the saints, and of the ruin which the papacy brought upon itself, by fostering a serpent while crushing a lamb, a few notes may be taken of that evil time, to show how grievous was the sore, and how bitter a thing it proved, that men had departed from the living God, whenever an apostate church began at last to reap the ripened fruit of its doings and of its doctrines. It was not for infidelity to replace the barrier which Catholicism had taken away between men and blood. And the revolutionists unsparingly multiplied their victims among those who had the mark of the beast and worshipped his image, as if they had been reckoning up against them the million that in an antichristian crusade had been slain in France for the testimony of Jesus.

"From being one of the most light-hearted and kind-tempered of nations, the French seemed upon the Revolution to have been animated not merely with the courage, but with the rabid fury of unchained wild beasts. While the ancient + Ibid. p. 157.

* Life of Napoleon, vol. i. pp. 320, 321.

institutions of France were crumbling to pieces of themselves, or were forcibly pulled down by state innovators,-that fine country was ravaged by a civil war of aggravated horrors, waged betwixt the rich and the poor, and marked by every species of brutal violence."

In La Vendee the inhabitants supported the cause of the clergy and nobles, and revolted against the revolutionary government. "Upwards of two hundred battles and skirmishes were fought in this devoted country. The revolutionary fever was in its access; the shedding of blood seemed to have become positive pleasure to the perpetrators of slaughter, and was varied by each invention which cruelty could invent to give it new zest. The habitations of the Vendeans were destroyed, their families subjected to violence and massacre, their cattle houghed and slaughtered, and their crops burned and wasted. One republican column assumed, and merited the name of the infernal, by the horrid atrocities which they committed. At Pillau, they roasted the women and children in a heated oven. Many similar horrors could be added, did not the heart and hand recoil from the task."-"The murders committed at Lyons, though hundreds were swept away by vollies of musket-shot, fell short of the horrors perpetrated by Carrier at Nantes, who, in avenging the republic on the obstinate resistance of La Vendee, might have summoned hell to match his cruelty, without a demon venturing to answer his challenge. Hundreds, men, women, and children, were forced on board of vessels which were scuttled and sunk in the Loire, and this was called republican baptism. Men and women were stripped, bound together, and thus thrown into the river, and this was called republican marriage. But we have said enough to show that men's blood seems to have been converted into poison, + Ibid. vol. ii. p. 236.

* Life of Napoleon, vol. i. P. 175.

and their hearts into stone, by the practices in which they were daily engaged.*-France, during the years 1793 and 1794, exhibited instances of extreme cruelty, in principle and practice, which make the human blood curdle. The cruelties of the laws denounced the highest penalties against those who relieved proscribed fugitives. They were executed with the most merciless rigour. The interdiction of fire and water to outlawed persons, of whatever description, was enforced with the heaviest penalty. The recusant and exiled priests often found among their former flock the means of concealment and existence, when it was death to administer them. Nothing short of such heroic actions could have prevented France, during this horrible period, from becoming an universal charnel-house, and her history an unvaried calendar of murder.”+

"The progress of civil war," to adopt the words of Lavallette," and the secret exertions of the royalists, could scarcely justify the massacres and the horrible tyranny under which the country groaned for so long a period. The rulers of the Assembly will remain for ever loaded with the odium which their barbarous government (of which history does not present another instance) will excite among future generations. Surely, if a few years before so many crimes were committed, they could have been pictured before the eyes of the most barbarous among their perpetrators, I fear not to say that all, even Robespierre himself, would have recoiled with horror. Men begin by caressing theories; a heated imagination presents them as useful and easy of execution; they toil, they advance unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till the contaminated mind corrupts sensibility, and adorns by the name of state-policy the most horrible outrages."‡

* Life of Napoleon, vol. ii. p. 296. † Ibid. vol. ii. p. 298-300. Lavellette's Memoirs, vol. i. pp. 177, 178.

Whatever may be the variety be the variety or discordance of political opinions respecting the French revolution, there cannot be a question or a doubt that it began to take the dominion with irresistible violence out of the hands of the papacy, and that it fell as a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image. The authority of the pope was judicially disannulled; the church lands were sold; the images were destroyed; "the churches were plundered of their gold and silver; even their bells were melted and cast into cannon ;"* thousands of nobility and clergy were compelled to forsake their country, a thing new to Europe, and take refuge among aliens; and in a land where the saints of the Most High had been exterminated or expelled, it was death to administer the means of concealment or existence to the recusant and exiled priests; and while the men were marked on whom it fell, never was any fact on earth more clear, than that the French Revolution was to them a noisome and grievous sore. It maintained in all its progress the same unvaried character, till other vials of wrath were poured forth in other forms.

CHAPTER XXV.

SECOND VIAL.

THERE is an obvious analogy between the second trumpet and the second vial; the sea, though, in regard to the former, in a more limited degree or restricted sense, being alike the scene of both. And

* Brewster's Encyclop. vol. ix. p. 635.