The French Revolution: The Retributive Character of the Coming Trouble

The French Revolution: The Retributive Character of the Coming Trouble

"utter extermination with everything established, as to abolish the common forms of address and salutation"

Paul S.L. Johnson - Some Shorter Types of Parousia Messenger - E09 413

"Studying various crises in human history, he recognized the presence in his day of similar, but more magnified conditions than those that marked such crises. E.g., the unmanageable crisis that introduced the French Revolution he found exhibited conditions similar to, but on a smaller scale than those which he saw about him; for he noted that just before the French Revolution religion was disparaged, authority was disobeyed, strife marked the relations of capital and labor, class hatred abounded, bread riots occurred, deep-seated dissatisfaction prevailed, great social inequalities were in vogue, agitations for radical changes were carried on, safety in flight was sought by close observers of the trend of things, reformers offered their panaceas and optimists saw everything evolving to better conditions. These very things that indicated the crisis leading up to the storm of the French Revolution, which broke with devastating effect, he saw on all hands, but in greatly magnified forms. He therefore reported these and showed that they foreshadowed the Time of Trouble. Such passages as Luke 21: 26; Is. 29: 14; etc., he recognized as forecasting this crisis. Thus he saw many secular signs presaging the coming trouble and faithfully reported the matter...

Pastor C.T. Russell - The Battle of Armageddon - The Battle of the Great Day pg 536

The retributive character of the great tribulation on fleshly Israel in the harvest of the Jewish age was very marked; so also was that of the French Revolution; and so it will be manifest in the present distress when the climax is reached. The remarks of Mr. Thomas H. Gill, in his
work, The Papal Drama, referring to the retributive character of the French Revolution, suggest also the retributive character of the coming trouble upon Christendom as a whole. He says:

"The more deeply the French Revolution is considered, the more manifest is its preeminence above all the strange and terrible things that have come to pass. … Never has the world witnessed so exact and sublime a piece of retribution. … If it inflicted enormous evil, it presupposed and overthrew enormous evil. … In a country where every ancient institution and every time-honored custom disappeared in a moment; where the whole social and political system went down before the first stroke; where monarchy, nobility and church were swept away almost without resistance, the whole framework of the state must have been rotten: royalty, aristocracy and priesthood must have grievously sinned. Where the good things of this world—birth, rank, wealth, fine clothes and elegant manners—became worldly perils, and worldly disadvantages for a time, rank, birth and riches must have been frightfully abused.

"The nation which abolished and proscribed Christianity, which dethroned religion in favor of reason, and enthroned the new goddess at Notre Dame in the person of a harlot, must needs have been afflicted by a very unreasonable and very corrupt form of Christianity. The people that waged a war of such utter extermination with everything established, as to abolish the common forms of address and salutation, and the common mode of reckoning time, that abhorred 'you' as a sin, and shrank from 'monsieur' as an abomination, that turned the weeks into decades, and would know the old months no more, must surely have had good reason to hate those old ways from which it pushed its departure into such minute and absurd extravagance.

"The demolished halls of the aristocracy, the rifled sepulchres of royalty, the decapitated king and queen, the little dauphin sadly done to death, the beggared princes, the slaughtered priests and nobles, the sovereign guillotine, the republican marriages, the Meudon tannery, the couples tied together and thrown into the Loire, the gloves made of men's and women's skins: these things are most horrible; but they are withal eloquent of retribution: they bespeak … the awful hand of an avenging power. They bring to mind the horrible sins of that old France; the wretched peasants ground beneath the weight of imposts from which the rich and noble were free; visited ever and anon by cruel famines by reason of crushing taxes, unjust wars, and monstrous mis-government, and then hung up or shot down by twenties or fifties for just complaining of starvation: and all this for centuries! They call to remembrance the Protestants murdered by millions in the streets of Paris, tormented for years by military dragoons in Poitou and Beam, and hunted like wild beasts in the Cevennes; slaughtered and done to death by thousands and tens of thousands in many painful ways. …

"In no work of the French Revolution is this, its retributive character, more strikingly or solemnly apparent than in its dealings with the Roman Church and Papal power. It especially became France, which after so fierce a struggle had rejected the Reformation, and perpetuated such enormous crimes in the process of rejection, to turn its fury against that very Roman Church … to abolish Roman Catholic worship, to massacre multitudes of priests in the streets of her great towns, to hunt them down through her length and breadth, and to cast them by thousands upon a foreign shore, just as she had slaughtered, hunted down and driven into exile hundreds of thousands of Protestants; … to carry the war into the Papal territories, and to heap all sorts of woes and shames upon the defenseless Popedom. … The excesses of revolutionary France were not more the punishment than the direct result of the excesses of … Papal France. …

"In one of its aspects the Revolution may be described as a reaction against the excesses, spiritual and religious, of the Roman Catholic persecution of Protestantism. No sooner had the torrent burst forth than it dashed right against the Roman Church and Popedom. … The property of the Church was made over to the state; the French clergy sank … to a salaried body; monks and nuns were restored to the world, the property of their orders being confiscated; Protestants were raised to full religious freedom and political equality … Catholic religion was … abolished.

"Bonaparte unsheathed the sword of France against the helpless Pius VI. … Berthier marched upon Rome, set up a Roman Republic, and laid hands upon the Pope. The sovereign pontiff was borne away to the camp of infidels … from prison to prison, and was finally carried captive into France. Here … he breathed his last, at Valence, where his priests had been slain, where his power was broken, and his name and office were a mockery and a byword; … the rude soldiers … for ten years held to his lips a cup of … bitterness. … It was a sublime and perfect piece of retribution, which so amazed the world at the end of the eighteenth century; this proscription of the Romish Church by that very French nation that slaughtered myriads of Protestants at her bidding; this mournful end of the sovereign pontiff, in that very Dauphine so consecrated by the struggles of the Protestants, and near those Alpine valleys where the Waldenses had been so ruthlessly hunted down by French soldiers; this transformation of the 'States of the Church' into the 'Roman Republic'; and this overthrow of territorial Popedom by that very French nation, which, just one thousand years ago, had, under Pepin and Charlemagne, conferred these territories.

"Multitudes imagined that the Papacy was at the point of death, and asked, would Pius VI. be the last pontiff, and if the close of the eighteenth century would be signalized by the fall of the Papal dynasty. But the French Revolution was the beginning, and not the end of the judgment; France had but begun to execute the doom, a doom sure and inevitable, but long and lingering, to be diversified by many strange incidents, and now and then by a semblance of escape, a doom to be protracted through much pain."

We must expect that the approaching trouble will be no less bitter and severe than these two illustrations...

Vol 4 battle of Armageddon

[[Editors Note:  As Pastor Russell himself said, we would rather pass by thoughts of the prospect of these horrible things occurring in silence, were it not for the grand and wonderful hope of the Kingdom of Messiah being made known right on the heels of this event which is to be man's last experience with sin and disobedience before the Kingdom is set up.  It is our hope to forearm others with the Truth on all this.  RB]]

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This is the MANNA for JUNE 2

I determined not to know any thing among you, save, Jesus Christ, and him crucified-1 Cor. 2: 2.
Our observation of those consecrated ones who have permitted other themes than "this gospel" to engross time and attention leads us to advise such to be very jealous in husbanding time and talent for the ministry of the Gospel, leaving all other subjects, however interesting, to others now, and to the future life for ourselves, when all knowledge shall be ours. Those who for any avoidable cause turn aside from the ministry of the true and only Gospel, we have invariably observed, are quickly turned out of the way or greatly hindered in their course toward the attaining of the Kingdom-Z '95, 116 (R 1811).
Christ Jesus and Him crucified signifies our Ransom and our Example. It therefore comprehends our justification and sanctification and is a brief summary of what Christ is to His followers. Our interest in one another as God's people should have this thought permeating all our relations with one another. We may profitably as fellow-disciples of Christ concentrate our attention upon this thought to the exclusion of all other things-P '32, 62.

Parallel passages: Gal. 6: 14; Phil. 3: 8, 13, 14; Acts 5: 30, 31, 42; 13: 23, 26-33; 16: 31; 17: 2, 3; 18: 5, 6; 19: 4; 20: 20, 21; 26: 22, 23; Rom. 5: 8-11; 1 Cor. 1: 17, 24, 30; 2: 3-8; 4: 1, 2; 3: 5-10; 2 Cor. 3: 3, 6; 4: 5; 6: 1.

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