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Eureka

AN EXPOSITION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Sixth Edition, 1915
By Dr. John Thomas (first edition written 1861)

 

 

Chapter 11

Section 2-3 Subsection 15

"The Rest Were Terrified"


 
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The rest, styled in the text hoi loipoi, the others not of the titled and privileged orders, became terrified. These terrified people composed that inert and patient part of the population of France, on which political experiments were being made. They were the swinish multitude of catholicism, which still clung to the worship of demonials and the works of men’s hands. The refractory priests were the living deities of these terrified heirs of capture and destruction. In this great judgment the Deity of Heaven first smote "the world rulers of the darkness, and their spirituals of the wickedness in the heavenlies;" He was now about to descend in terrorism upon the guilty devotees of blasphemy, who in a past generation had lent a willing hand in slaying His witnesses, and suppressing their enlightening testimony.

The wicked are Deity’s sword for vengeance upon blasphemers of His word and Name, until the time come to give the execution of judgment into the hands of the saints. We need not, therefore, be surprised at finding among his political witnesses and avengers such men as Marat, Danton, Robespierre, St. Juste, surnamed "the Apocalyptic," and such like. If He did not employ "the basest of men" to execute terrifying vengeance upon guilty nations, how would such have been punished during the past eighteen centuries? If nations will "blaspheme His name, and His tabernacle, and them that dwell in the heaven;" if they will persist in upholding spiritual impostures, and in making his word of none effect by their absurd and impious traditions, they must be punished as nations; and, as real, scriptural, saints are so scarce, the vengeance of Samuel upon Agag must be in the meantime executed by wicked men as the blind instruments of his will.

A terrified people implies the existence of terrifiers; and that these terrorists were stronger than the terrified. The history of the period is in rigid harmony with this implication. The retributive and righteous providence of Deity, by successive shocks of the great earthquake, had brought the besotted worshippers of the daemonials and idols under what has been styled by eminence "THE REIGN OF TERROR." This power was more terrific than any that has oppressed society since the flood. The twenty-five millions of affrighted catholic French "dared no longer express any opinion. They were afraid to visit their friends lest they might be compromised with them, and lose liberty and even life. A hundred thousand arrests, and hundreds of condemnations, rendered imprisonment and the scaffold ever present to their minds. They had to bear heavy taxes. Sometimes they had to give up their crops, or their most valuable effects in gold and silver. They durst no longer display any luxury, or indulge in noisy pleasures. They were no longer permitted to use metallic money, but obliged to take and give a depreciated paper, with which it was difficult to procure such things as they needed. They were forced, if storekeepers, to sell at a fictitious price; if buyers, to put up with the worst commodities. They had but one sort of black bread, common to the rich as to the poor, for which they were obliged to contend at the doors of the bakers, after waiting for several hours. Never had power overthrown with greater violence the habits of a people. It threatened all lives, decimated all fortunes, fixed compulsorily the standard of the exchanges, gave new names to all things, and abolished with insult the superstition of the ‘terrified’."

This terrible power that blindly avenged the saints, found vent through the Jacobins of the Mountain. Of these, the most terrible was Marat. He was born of Calvinist parents, with a hideous face, and head monstrously disproportioned to his size. He had a daring mind, an ungovernable imagination, a vindictive temper, and the heart of a tiger. In the period of the earthquake, his natural enthusiasm rose to delirium, in which he preached upon revolt, murder, and pillage. In one of his speeches he said, "Massacre 270,000 partisans of the former order of things." "His political exhortations," says Sir Walter Scott, "began and ended like the howl of a blood-hound for murder. It was blood which was Marat’s constant demand; not in drops from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter of families; but blood in the profusion of an ocean." "None exercised a more fatal influence upon the period in which he lived. To him was owing the idea realized at a later period -- the extermination of multitudes. He regarded the French as paltry revolutionists. ‘Give me,’ said he, ‘two hundred Neapolitans, the knife in their right hand, in their left a muff, to serve for a shield, and with these I will traverse France, and complete the Revolution.’ It was necessary, he asserted, to strike off several thousand heads, and to destroy all the aristocrats, who rendered liberty impossible. Under this name he included royalists, constitutionalists, and Girondins; and that none might escape, it was only necessary to fall upon those who had carriages, servants, silk clothes, and who were coming out of the theatres. All such were assuredly aristocrats. This pitiless avenger was supported by Danton, Robespierre, and others like them; sat in the National Convention as a member of the Mountain, presided over the Society of Jacobins, and was ultimately deified in this carnival of blood.

"Marat was abhorred by his colleagues; but they did not abhor making use of him. They placed him in their midst, they put him in their van, they bore him as it were upon their breasts, like a head of Medusa. As the horror of such a man was everywhere, you fancied that you perceived him everywhere; you almost imagined," said Garat, "that he was the whole Mountain, or that the whole Mountain was, as it were, he. Among the leaders, in fact, there were several who found no other fault of the misdeeds of Marat, but that they were too undisguised."

From this class of agents issued the sanguinary terror by which "the rest were affrighted." After it had prostrated the Tenth Throne of the Great City, it filled the prisons with crowds of suspected sympathizers with royalty and the recent order of things. These arrests were made by the police under the direction of Marat, "whose name alone," says Petion, "strikes terror into the souls of all peaceable citizens." A rumor was started that there was a plot to liberate all the prisoners, who were then to spread themselves through Paris, to commit all sorts of excesses, and to carry off the king. Apprehensive of this, the secret directory caused the alarm gun to be fired, and the tocsin to be sounded. The mob collected, broke into the prisons, and, on September 2, 1792, began a work of carnage which continued for several days. Twenty-four priests were sent to the Abbaye for refusing to take the oath to the constitution. On descending from the coaches to enter the prison, they were immediately pierced by a thousand weapons, amidst the howls of an infuriated populace. Led by Maillard, they rushed to the church of the Carmelites, where they butchered two hundred priests of the Catholic Baal who had been confined there.

Being refreshed with wine, they returned to the Abbaye. There they organized a criminal tribunal, of which Maillard was the terrible president. A list of the prisoners was placed before him. They were brought out in order and questioned. When he pronounced the words, "Sir, to La Force!" he was passed out at the gate, supposing that he was being transferred to that prison. But, when the door closed upon him, he was suddenly hewn to pieces by the swords of the party posted there.

"Terror," was proclaimed to be "the order of the day," and a secret authority overawed that which was public. The massacre continued through the night. Amidst this carnage, however, they spared some victims, and manifested inconceivable joy in giving them their lives. A young man, declared pure from aristocracy, was acquitted with shouts of "Vive la nation!" and borne in triumph in the bloody arms of the executioners. The Governor of the Invalides was sentenced to La Force. Perceiving him from the prison, his daughter rushed out amongst pikes and swords, and, with piteous supplications, besought them to spare him. Handing her a pot of human blood, "Drink, then," said they, "the blood of the aristocrats!" She drank -- and her father was saved.

"After thirty hours of carnage," says Peltier, "sentence was passed on Cazotte. The instrument of death was already uplifted; and bloody hands were stretched out to pierce his aged breast. His daughter, seizing him round the neck, exclaimed, ‘You shall not get at my father till you have forced your way through my heart.’ The pikes were instantly checked, and a shout of pardon was raised by a thousand voices. Elizabeth embraced the murderers; and, covered with human blood, but triumphant, proceeded to lodge her father safe in the midst of his family." Another of the few capriciously saved was escorted home with great attention by these Avengers. Dripping with blood, they begged leave to witness the joy of his family, and immediately after returned to the carnage "In this convulsive state," says M. Thiers, "all the emotions succeeded each other in the heart of man. By turns, a mild and ferocious animal, he weeps and then slaughters. Steeped in blood, he is all at once touched by an instance of ardent affection or of noble firmness. He is sensible to the honor of appearing just, to the vanity of appearing upright or disinterested."

During this terrific night, the avengers had divided and carried destruction into the other prisons of Paris. Like massacres were perpetrated, and blood flowed in streams. Consternation pervaded all Paris. The slaughter of the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal by the command of Elijah was nothing in comparison. The members of the Commune declared that the people had been just; that they had punished criminals only; and that, in their vengeance, if they had done wrong, it was merely by anticipating the sword of the law. The only place preserved from attack was the Temple, against the royal inmates of which the popular fury was particularly excited; so that, for six hours, it was very doubtful whether they would be massacred or not.

The Bicetre Hospital was the scene of the longest and bloodiest carnage This prison was the receptacle of every vice; it was an hospital, also, for the foulest and most afflicting diseases. It was the sink of Paris. The avengers of crime put every creature there to death. Not less than 6000 were slain during the eight days and nights of the slaughter. Pikes, swords, and muskets not being expeditious enough, recourse was had to cannon. A long and deadly resistance was made by the victims, but they were all eventually slain. During the three days of slaughter, about eight thousand prisoners were mercilessly put to death.

The prisons having been thus cleared by fire and sword, the terrorists began to fill them again by new arrests founded upon suspicions of incivism. While operating in Paris, terrorist commissioners were despatched to the departments to exhort them to imitate the sanguinary example of the Capital. Collot d’Herbois, surnamed the Tiger, was almost equal to Marat. When he departed for Lyons, he protested that the South should be soon purified. He employed a column of the revolutionary army, with cannon, to make up for the slowness of the guillotine. Freron displayed extreme activity and zeal in the work of death. He proclaimed the purpose of raising Toulon to the ground. Writing to Bayle, he says: "Things go on well here; every day since our arrival we have caused two hundred heads to fall, and already eight hundred Toulonese have been shot". Eight thousand Toulonese assembled in the Champs de Mars. The commissioners were shocked at the sight of this multitude of victims. Freron himself was terrified. A great number of the most guilty were instantly shot. The musketry shooting being insufficient, they afterwards had recourse to cannon. In another execution of this nature, in order to despatch the victims who had not perished by the first discharge, Freron cried out, "Let those who are still living rise; the republic pardons them." Some arose, when he caused them to be immediately fired upon. On quitting Toulon, he went to finish the depopulation of Marseilles. Here they destroyed more than four hundred persons by a criminal tribunal; and caused some of its finest buildings to be demolished.

"Wearied with the slow operation of the guillotine," says Alison, "they destroyed their prisoners in masses by firing at them with grapeshot." In La Vendee, the noyades became celebrated: men and women, in vessels full or in couples, being there drowned by the victorious avengers, and the noyades called Republican Baptism and Republican Marriage. At Pillau, they roasted women and children in a heated oven. In these horrors, one regiment assumed to itself the title of Infernal. Altogether, the massacres during the Reign of Terror are reckoned at 1,022,351. Thus were avenged the 75,000 slain in France, A.D. 1572; the unnumbered thousands slain in the anti-witness war; the 100,000 destroyed at their political death; and the 800,000, or 1,000,000 ruined exiles of 1685. The kings of France are computed to have put to death in torments a million of the witnesses for Jesus under the Satanic inspiration of the Romish priests. Can we, then, in reading the horrors perpetrated in the Reign of Terror, and which principally fell upon the clergy and their adherents, forbear to exclaim, "Righteous art thou, O Lord, who art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. True and righteous are thy judgments!" (Apoc. xvi. 5).
 
 

The Terrorists were the sword and scourge of Deity upon the guilty. They were raised up by Him to retaliate upon the king, court, nobility, priests, and people, the murders and crimes of every sort, which had accumulated upon their heads until his longsuffering was exhausted. The nation was paralyzed, as well as astounded and affrighted. It was the Terrorists that condemned the king and queen to lose their heads, by which they broke definitively with royalty and all thrones; and afterwards destroyed the Girondins for their want of zeal in the regeneration of France by the guillotine. This was the overthrow of all legality, and the establishment of the Terrible Dictatorship, developed in the Committee of Public Welfare.

From May 31, 1793, commence scenes a hundred times more awful and more terrible than the massacres of the prisons of Paris. La Vendee, the stronghold of the priests, was all fire and blood. Their forces were styled, "the royal and catholic armies." The partisans of absolute power were simultaneously lifting up their heads for a grand rally against the Revolution. The conflict that ensued resulted in the establishment of the Committee of Public Welfare, which was absolute master of the situation, being empowered -- to send the people either to the field of battle, to the scaffold, or to prison; and, for the defence of the Revolution, was possessed of a sovereign and terrible dictatorship. The judgment-seat of this fearful committee was the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose institution was caused by Danton. Its familiars pervaded the land, and all the great cities of France experienced its vengeance. "THE MOUNTAIN" was now in the ascendant -- it ruled with terror in the heaven into which it had ascended when called up thither by the "great voice," or edict of the king. The ruling power in the Mountain was Robespierre and the Jacobins. The Committee and Tribunal were directed by them; and however great their vengeance upon nobles, priests, the rich, and their adherents, greater vengeance was soon to be displayed in Paris. It is a remarkable fact, that the cities and districts where the blood of the saints and witnessing prophets of Jesus had been poured out most abundantly and with the greatest barbarity, suffered the most horribly in the Reign of Terror. After the decapitation of Marie Antoinette and the Girondins, the sword of execution had no rest. All that was considered most noble and most generous was perishing either by suicide or by the blade of the executioner. "The whole country seemed one vast conflagration of revolt and vengeance. The shrieks of death were blended with the yell of the assassin and the laughter of buffoons."

In conclusion, under this head, I remark, in the words of Alison, that, after April, 1794, "one only power now remained -- alone, terrible, irresistible. This was the power of Death, wielded by a faction (of which Robespierre was chief), steeled against every feeling of humanity, dead to every principle of justice. In their iron hands order resumed its sway from the influence of terror; obedience became universal from the extinction of hope. Silent and unresisted, they led their victims to the scaffold, dreaded alike by the soldiers who crouched, the people who trembled, and the victims who suffered. The history of the world has no parallel to the horrors of that long night of suffering!"
 

 

 

 

 


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