Love Under Fire

Enmity Against Christ

“Where also our Lord was crucified.” This was also fulfilled by France. In no other country did the truth have more cruel opposition. In the persecution heaped on those who took their stand for the gospel, France had crucified Christ in the person of His disciples. LF 115.1

Century after century the blood of the saints had been shed. While the Waldenses laid down their lives on the mountains of Piedmont “for the testimony of Jesus Christ,” the Albigenses of France had given a similar witness. The disciples of the Reformation had been put to death with horrible tortures. King and nobles, highborn women and delicate maidens had feasted their eyes on the dying agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots had poured out their blood on many a hard-fought battlefield. Protestants had been hunted down like wild beasts. LF 115.2

The few descendants of the ancient Christians who remained in France in the eighteenth century, hiding away in the mountains of the south, still cherished the faith of their fathers. They were dragged away to lifelong slavery in the galleys. The most refined and intelligent of the French were chained, in horrible torture, among robbers and assassins. Others were shot down in cold blood as they fell on their knees in prayer. Their country, laid waste with the sword, the axe, and the stake, “was converted into one vast, gloomy wilderness.” “These atrocities took place ... in no dark age, but in the brilliant era of Louis XIV. Science was then cultivated, literature flourished, the clergy of the royal court and of the capital were educated and eloquent men who made a great show of the graces of meekness and charity.”³ LF 115.3