And the seventh angel poured out his bowl upon the air... And there were lightnings, and voices, and thunders; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since there were men upon the earth, so great an earthquake, so mighty. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.-REVELATION xvi. 17-19.

on a table in the chief place of concourse, had given the signal for revolt, exclaiming: "Friends, shall we die like hares hunted down; like sheep dragged to the place of slaughter, bleating for mercy where there is no mercy, nothing but the sharpened knife? The hour is come, the decisive hour for France and for all mankind, in which there shall be a reckoning between the oppressed and the oppressor, and the watch word shall be, 'Speedy death or deliverance.' Welcome the hour. For us there is but one fitting cry: To arms!' Let all Paris, all France, as with the voice of the whirlwind, resound with the cry, 'to arms.'

With such words ringing in their ears they shout defiance to the battlements and assault the drawbridge. The battlements answer with the thunder of cannon, and great gaps are made in their ranks. Maddened at the sight of blood they throw deliberation to the winds. They bring cannon and train them upon the walls. The drawbridge is lowered, and they rush in, smite down the commander and his chief officers and break open the dungeon doors. And the next day amid the thunder of cannon, the pealing of the Te Deum, and the acclamations of thousands, the work of destruction begins, and speedily the long feared and hated Bastile is a heap of smoking ruins; and from that hour that mighty and ever memorable upheaval, known to all the world as the French Revolution, goes swiftly on.

Let us look forward four years to the month of December, 1793, and behold its culmination in a scene that has no parallel in the history of the world.

Forth from the hall where the Revolutionary Convention is holding its sessions there issues one day a strange nondescript procession. The central figure is a woman, sitting in a palanquin,

borne on the shoulders of rough-looking men tricked out for mere mockery in the habiliments of the priesthood. She has upon her head a red woolen night-cap. Around her shoulders is loosely flung a tawdry sky-blue mantle. A garland of oak leaves encircles her temples. And she brandishes in her hands a rude spear or pike, the common weapon of the revolutionists. Following in the rear, as a guard of honor, come the members of the Convention, many prominent agitators and leaders of the Revolution, and a motley crowd of the populace, all wearing the common badge of the red woolen cap. And so with shouts and gibes and ribald laugh, mingled with the sounds of fife and drum, they march through the streets, enter the great cathedral of Notre Dame, place the bedizened woman (a well known prostitute) upon the high altar, chant in hoarse tones a revolutionary hymn, and name her "the goddess of reason," the only divinity to whom they will henceforth pay homage.

This strange mockery of things once held sacred, this unequaled culmination of blasphemy, this utter wantonness and bravado of irreligion, is an essential feature of the new movement. These two scenes show us in startling distinctness the forces that are urging it on. This recklessness of despair, and this equal recklessness of unbelief are the two chief powers that have issued in the Reign of Terror.

They have not been reached by a sudden bound. They are the growth of centuries. They are the legitimate fruits of the seed of falsehood and wrong sown by those who ought to have sown the seed of righteousness and truth. The lying dogmas of the Romish priests, their sham sanctity contradicted by lives most dissolute, their hollow ceremonials, their cunning priestcraft, their hypocrisy

and avarice and extortion, have been gauged and penetrated by the subtle intellect of the French, and the inevitable reaction has come. Finding the religion in which they were bred a delusion and a snare, they naturally lose faith in all religion and rush to the extreme of infidelity and blank atheism.

To this extreme they were also goaded by the intolerable civil wrongs under which they were crushed. They saw a sham church joining hands with a sham aristocracy and a sham monarchy to grind them beneath the heel of a worse than oriental despotism. The great estates of the nobles, the rich benefices of the clergy, the vast prerogatives of the crown, stood over against a degradation, a poverty and a serfdom that seem, and may well seem, incredible to the reader of the day.

"The Aristocrats," as the three orders were called, had become the veriest leeches, fattening on the life-blood drawn by priestcraft and legal machinery from the veins of the people. "Closely viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Such are the shepherds of the people; and now how fares it with the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill and even worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for to do statute labor, to pay statute taxes, to fatten battle fields with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man, but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed, to pine stagnantly in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction; this is the lot of the millions."

Can we wonder that the people in such a case should lose all