Text: "And I will bring distress upon men that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung." (Zeph. 1:17)

Hatred of Calvinist Theology

After decades of brutal persecution of Calvinist Huguenots, the Roman Catholic Church announced it had expelled or "converted" all Protestants in France. A century of hunting, and gassing, and drowning, and hanging, and burning, and skinning alive men, women and children had left the French people calloused toward God and men. They had become drunk on the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

For over a century they had spurned the blessings that attend obedience to the Law of God. Clergy and laity had become increasingly degenerate until French society was preeminently profligate. What the prophet had said of Judah had become true of France: the people walked like blind men because they had sinned against the Lord, and their blood would be poured out like dust and their flesh would be considered as dung.

Fidelity in marriage was disregarded as men and women acted out their depravity. Motherhood was considered with contempt. Beaumarchais declared the French Revolution broke forth "amid the yells and the fierce violence of women." They had judged themselves unworthy of Virtue and Truth, and God removed them far from the French people until even the knowledge or things they once understood were lost.

When virtuous and religious element --that element that gives stability to a people, was now destroyed. The people were now ripe to be re-educated.

In 1780, the reported intelligentsia of France published a work that was supposed to comprise the whole circle of knowledge, but the intent of which was the utter subversion of religion. It was called The Encyclopedia. Among its compilers were Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and D’Alembert --the very architects of the atheistic revolution.

The French people had rejected theology and had embraced the philosophy of Rationalism. Samuel Smiles declares

State-controlled Churches

On November 2, 1789, the National Assembly declared all church property to be at the disposal of the state. It softened the blow by guaranteeing the salaries of church officials. The following year, on April 22nd, the Revolutionary government of France confiscated all church property. And, on July 12, 1790, the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy" declared the church dissolved as a political entity. The same year, on November 27th, the Revolutionary Assembly passed a law demanding all bishops take an oath of obedience to the civil constitution, and threatening all who refused with dismissal from their posts.

With the pulpits of France silent, the Revolutionary forces had a free hand to establish their atheistic rule. Already the universities had become moral wastelands. Their books were empty. Abbe Raynal openly assailed Christianity and Father Lomenie openly confessed his atheism. It had become fashionable to publicly renounce teachings once professed to embrace the preachments of the humanists.

The Secularization of Society

Voltaire and Diderot knew the secularization of society produces revolution, and therefore they wrote satirically and cynically of all religion. Danton, Marat and Robespierre assailed the Roman Catholic Church. The French people had suffered oppression for centuries. At first, they listened to the counsels of the ungodly, but when they cried "Ecrasez l’Infame" – "Remove the Infamy", the unfed and untaught rose as one man and attacked church buildings and left them in flames. Even the cemeteries were not respected as this new breed of vandals wreaked their havoc.

A century before, it was Huguenot meeting houses that were set ablaze by the Papist population. Now, it was the Roman Catholic churches that were torched.

Irreligion--Anti-Religion

Church bells were cast into cannon. Church-plate was coined into money. Then, the French Convention abolished religion and declared the people to be the only god. The fruit of rationalism is first irreligion, and then anti-religion. Some Roman Catholic priests were chained as they had chained Protestants not many years before. Some were sent as prisoners to Rochelle, and to the Isle of Aix. Others were guillotined.

One group of Roman Catholic clergy on their way to the galleys encountered a procession of asses clothed in the garments of priests. A sow wearing a mitre led the procession.

In Aix, roads where Protestant galley slaves had lain before, 400 priests were now seen ragged, sordid, hungry--wasted to shadows, eating their unclean rations on deck, circularly in parties of a dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their scandalous clothes between two stones, choked in horrible miasmata, under close hatches, seventy of them in a berth through the night, so that the aged priest is found lying dead in the morning in an attitude of prayer.3

The nation that will not have the Gospel of God will accept the Gospel of humanism. So, France that would not have the preaching of the Bayles, the Claudes and the Saurins now fell under the spell of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, and the Diderots.

The monasteries had been allowed to become abodes of laziness and self-indulgence. On May 4, 1792, the Pope was burned in effigy before the palace while the people shouted their approval.

On May 27th, the Revolutionary government passed legislation making it possible for 20 citizens of a district to request the local department to charge with sedition those priests who refused to swear allegiance to the Revolutionary government. The justification of the law was said to be the rumor of a conspiracy in the department of Tarn to murder the Calvinists living there.

On August 23rd, a bill was passed in the Revolutionary Assembly commanding all non-juring priests to leave France within 14 days. Failure to do so would result in banishment to Guiana. It is reported that 40,000 priests were expatriated. Eight thousand others fled to Protestant England.

The Denial of Freedom to Worship

A century before, Louis the Great had revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685) thus denying the French people the fundamental freedom to worship. Michelet, the French historian wrote "Surely never had man’s dearest treasure--Liberty, been more lavishly squandered." 4

The years following the revocation was characterized by massacres and banishments and torture of Protestants, but now there was "sanscullotism" or "revolution," and what was known as "The Reign of Terror." The successors of the very priests whom Louis had set up to extirpate Reformed worship in France were now themselves banished or guillotined.

The fleeing priests fled in precisely the same direction the Huguenot pastors had fled a century before. God had given time and space to the French people to repent, but they had shut up their bowels to the Gospel of Peace.

What irony that the fugitive priests should set their eyes on England as the Calvinist Protestants had done before them! England offered a refuge for people persecuted on account of their religion, and to England came the descendants of the very persecutors to settle among the descendants of the very Huguenots their predecessors had driven from their country a century before.

The Emigration of 1685 and The Emigration of 1793

Not since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had England experienced such an emigration from France. In 1685 the emigrants consisted almost entirely of the industrial class --artisans, merchants, etc., but the emigrants of 1793 consisted not only of Roman Catholic priests, but of noblemen as well --noblemen who were the 3rd and 4th generation of them who had directed the bloody purge of Huguenots.

In 1793, England was deluged with a largely non-productive class of people. They were the very men who had so misguided and mistaught the people that in nearly all parts of France the men and women had risen to throw them out of the country. Michelet wrote,

Samuel Smiles observed

The Destruction of the Family

On August 30, 1792, the Revolutionary Assembly made divorce legal by simply declaring it. Although the decree was amended on September 30th to "common agreement" it nevertheless gave a stinging blow to society’s most fundamental unit --the family.

On September 20th of the same year, the Assembly decreed the registry of births, marriages and deaths be transferred from the Church to the civil authorities.

The Abolition of the "Lord’s Day"

In an all-out effort to abolish religion in France, the Revolutionary forces on October 5, 1793 issued a calendar that divided the 12 months into 5 decades of days. The purpose was to abolish the Lord’s Day. Voltaire had declared it to be impassible to destroy the Christian religion as long as the Lord’s Day was considered to be of Divine origin. To expedite their will, the revolutionaries re-named the days of the week and called them after products of the soil, etc.

Some of the school children, having been so prompted, even asked they be not made to pray in the name of a so-called God, and asked instead they be instructed in the fundamentals of equality, the rights of mankind and the Constitution.

On November 7, 1793 Gobel, the Archbishop of Paris, read a letter to the Convention declaring himself to be "a priest and therefore, a charlatan." He then walked to the President’s desk and laid his letter of appointment to the post, and declared the will of the people had been his first law and that from that time, there could be no national worship except that of Freedom and Equality. Five months later, He ascended the scaffold and was executed having been charged with the destruction of morals.

An apostate Protestant by the name of Julien of Toulouse declared Protestantism also had its charlatans, and that henceforth he would take no sanctuary but the Law, and would have no god but Freedom, and no gospel except the Republican Constitution. In April the following year, he was sentenced to death by the guillotine.

ON TAKING COMMAND OF OUR CHILDREN, AND

OF OUR HOUSEHOLD AFTER US

Text: "For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring, upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him." -- (Gen. 18:19)

The faith and character of Abraham is nowhere better revealed than by his commanding his children and his household after him. By "commanding" his household, we are to understand that he taught them and that he ruled them.

Abraham knew that as a father and master, God had given him the responsibility of overseeing his home, and the authority to fulfil that responsibility. He therefore assumed that authority not by constraint but willingly.

He was not content to pray with his children: he took charge of them. If he was to have a well-ordered family, one that would keep the way of the Lord, Abraham knew he could not neglect family duties. Since his children belonged to the Lord, he would guide them in the way they should go.

Humanly speaking, if the truth of God was to be preserved in the earth, the children of Abraham would have to preserve it. Consequently, he gave careful diligence to their Doctrine and to their Discipline. Only in this way was he able to command his household when he was in the grave.

Abraham’s responsibility did not cease with his children: God would hold him responsible for his household after him. Therefore, he assumed the spiritual care of the all his servants as well as of all his guests who came under his roof. It is to be much lamented that when the ungodly visit most Christian homes, the people of God usually sit at home and entertain their guests instead of maintaining their testimony by attending worship, both public and private.

Abraham commanded his children, and his household in "the way of the Lord." The "way of the Lord" is here defined as the doing of "justice" and "judgment." "Justice" involves doing good to all, while "judgment" means that we extend our hand to the miserable, and plead the cause of the righteous. Micah defined the "way of the Lord" to "do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." (Micah 6:8)

God here assures Abraham that his labor with his household will not be in vain: "They shall keep the way of the Lord." And, God has given us a similar promise: "Train up a child in the way, he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." {Proverbs 22:6) The promise, however, is only given to them who will "train up" their children. The abysmal state of morality in most Christian homes is an awesome testimony that MOST CHRISTIAN FATHERS DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH REGARD OF RIGHTEOUSNESS TO TAKE COMMAND OF THEIR HOMES.

God taught Abraham the blessing of God will not continue apart from ethical living. This is the condition upon which the blessing of God rests; and because Abraham wanted the blessing of God upon his family, he took command of his household.

When God said, "For I know him that he will command his children and his household after him," He meant He had chosen Abraham that he would command his home. What is true of Abraham is also true of us: we are chosen, called, and saved so that we will command our children, and our household after us.

Abraham bore a vital testimony of Truth in the earth. God did not make His will known to Abraham in order that it might die with him, but that he would communicate it to his children and to his household after him. In like manner God does not teach us Truth for our pleasure, but that we may communicate it to our family; and, if we do not do it, God will punish us by taking His Truth from our children.

Christians must take care that God’s Truth will flourish after their death. In spiritual matters, nothing is more contrary to faith than laziness. If we would have the blessing of God upon our children and our grandchildren, we must take command of our household.

God will preserve His Truth in the earth; but they who are remiss in communicating it to their families are remiss because they do not have a proper regard for God’s Truth.