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 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 vol Life of Napoleon, vol. i. p. 157. + Ibid. p. 175. lies 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, 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 existtence, 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 horribly 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 *Life of Napoleon, vol ii. p. 296. + Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 298-300. present another instance) will excite among future generations. Surely, if a few years before so many crimes were commited, 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." Whatever may 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 * Lavallette's Memoirs, vol. i. pp. 177, 178. 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 in comparing things spiritual with spiritual, or one portion of scripture with another, in which the same words have the same signification, and looking to history in its order, the judgments of God may be seen as manifestly in the fulfilment of the second vial as of the second trumpet, the historical exposition of which was left exclusively to Gibbon. Of the second trumpet it is said, " And the second angel sounded, and, AS IT WERE, a great mountain, burning with fire, was cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed. Under the second vial no symbol or similitude of the form in which the wrath was to come are given, but the scene and the similar effect of it are told. And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man; and every living soul died in the sea. In a more enlarged sense, we have to look once again, as in the days of Genseric, but after the lapse of nearly four teen hundred years, to the sea, to witness the similar but still deadlier effect of the latter vision. No prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation; the event finally unfolds it. At the end it will speak and not lie. And if the time be indeed past, and the judgment be manifest, the proof of it may be obvious, and the most patent of all authorities may be appealed to in illustration. We have seen, from Gibbon, how the different events predicted in the Revelation of Jesus Christ followed in their due order and course, and were often intimately connected. And now, come down to modern times, we need but to open an almanack,* to see the close succession and connexion between the first and second vial, copying the words in their exact order. 1792 France became a republic. 1793 King of France guillotined, January 21. Queen of France guillotined, October 1. 1794 French fleet defeated by Earl Howe, June 1. 1795 Again by Lord Bridport. 1797 Spanish fleet defeated by Earl St. Vincent. Feb. 14. Dutch fleet defeated by Lord Duncan, October 11. 1798 French fleet defeated by Lord Nelson, August 1. In February 1793, war was declared by France * Chronology of remarkable occurrences, in the Edinburgh Almanack, for any year of the present century. Truth may sometimes be easily found in a common footpath, while it may be painfully searched for in vain in the most intricate mazes. It is here, we think, patent to the world. And it is but to show a token of its simplicity, to state that the inspection of the almanack, as above, first confirmed, if it did not suggest, the interpretation here given of the second vial. History, in these reforming days, has been called an old almanack. Though it were nothing more, it has still its facts and its dates; and these are enough for the elucidation of prophecy. And though it abounds with beacons rather than finger-posts, there are still marks and mile-stones to which the Christian can point in triumph, and claim as his own, as they show that, whether on the sea or the land, no conqueror ever strayed from the path which the scriptures predicted as the way he would take, or the work he would do. |