ROME still tries to hide the truth of the massacre of St. Bartholomew from the eyes of the world at large, but no web of falsehoods can possibly obscure the horrors, the iniquity, and the cunning of that awful event. It stands out in all its infernal darkness upon the page of history, as a proof of what Rome is, and as a warning to the peoples of Christendom never to trust her.
Protestant truth had been making strong headway in France, and in the middle of the sixteenth century the Huguenots had established their power, and, to a great extent, their liberty. They had won their position by invincible courage, and by the blood of thousands of their noblest men, and they stood in France, in their districts and towns, a great army of free men, who would not be the slaves of Popery.
In the year 1569 Pope Pius V., finding that the King of France could not subdue his Protestant subjects to the Papacy, proposed treachery and massacre. This so-called representative of Jesus Christ on earth thus wrote to King Charles IX.: "Unless they are radically extirpated they will be found to shoot up again, and, as it has already happened several times, the mischief will reappear when your Majesty least expects it. You will bring this about if no consideration of persons or worldly things induces you to spare the enemies of God. "While to Catherine de Medici he promised the assistance of heaven if she pursued them" till they are all massacred, for it is only by the entire extirpation of heretics that the Roman Catholic worship can be restored.”
Pope Pius V. was a devout man in the sense of austerity and poverty, and in the recitation of prayers; indeed he was regarded in Rome as one of the holiest of the Popes. And what is perhaps more interesting, he was canonized—therefore he is "Saint," according to Rome. He regarded himself as the appointed minister of his God to destroy all heretics from off the face of the earth.
How to massacre the Huguenots was a task which taxed the ingenuity of both prelates and kings. First, the Huguenots had to be deluded into the belief that the Government and Court of France were favorable to them. Deception upon a grand scale was necessary, and deception of a most ingenious kind, as over and over again the Huguenots had been deceived, and they were alive to their danger. To begin with, the brave Admiral de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, was enticed from his home to Paris, and the young King embraced him with mock joy, restored to him the dignities he had forfeited because he was a Huguenot, and also his pensions, and professed to place the Admiral in a high position in the fleet.
The French Court, which was serving His Holiness the Pope, is described by the Archbishop of Paris of the time, as under the reign of "impiety, atheism, necromancy, perjury, poisonings, and assassinations"! Nevertheless, when the King pledged himself to "indefatigable obedience to the Holy See" in the destruction of the heretics, the joy of the Pope was great. The Pope, his cardinals, and the Kings of France and Spain, together with other celebrities, were all working together to destroy the believers in God's Word. This should surely be a warning to the people of England, who can but observe what is being done today by lords, both spiritual and temporal, in the land, who are seeking for the reunion (as they term it) of Christendom, which would mean another and more awful St. Bartholomew's. There was also an effort made by the King to create a faction strife, or civil war, in Paris, so that the means would be the better at hand to destroy his loyal subjects, the objects of Papal hatred. This, however, did not succeed; therefore the massacre pure and simple had to be enacted. Naturally the story of a widespread conspiracy began to ooze out, and the King, dreading lest he should be overwhelmed by the storm he had now raised, went forward, as he exclaimed: "Let Coligny be killed, and let not one Huguenot in all France be left to reproach me with the deed!”
At eleven one Saturday night the arrangements for the massacre were perfected. The bloody work was to begin at daybreak, and all who were not in the secret, and wore the white cross upon their hats, or the white scarf upon the left arm, were devoted to destruction. At two o'clock in the morning the toscin was sounded, and the great bell of the Palace of Justice began to toll. The first pistol shot was heard, and church steeple after church steeple in Paris pealed forth the call to slay. Shouts and oaths filled the streets, and above the din arose constantly the fearful words, "Kill! kill!”
None were spared. The nobles who had been enticed from their country residences, and were the King's guests in his palace, were dragged out of their beds and hacked to pieces. The streets were crowded with victims fleeing for life—to be overtaken with murderous blows—and with the bodies of the dead. Old and young, and babes in arms, were alike slain. From house roofs and windows the corpses of fugitives were thrown into the streets, where they were hacked and kicked. The streets were red, and the very Seine ran through Paris a river of blood. Soon the arches of the bridges were blocked by the mass of corpses. Yet the assassins stayed not their hands.
Such was Rome, "Holy" Rome, on the morning of the 24th August, 1572.
For a full week the massacres continued in Paris; the King himself, drunk with the passion of slaughter, found pastime in shooting down his own subjects, and for two long months the slaughter was continued throughout France. A Romanist who gazed upon the heaps of corpses of his fellow-countrymen in the city of Lyons, said, "They surely were not men, but devils in the shape of men, who did this.”
When the news of the terrible murders reached the Holy See, the Pope was full of thanksgivings. Cannon were fired, processions were made, the churches were illuminated, and God was praised. The Pope had a medal struck in commemoration of the event-also a great picture painted, that the horrors of it should be present to his eye; and to this day his tomb bears upon it the allusion to the iniquity, as one of his honors and acts of piety.
We do not question the honesty of this Pope, but we do not forget the Lord's words: "The time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor Me."
We do not question the honesty of the Church in these deeds of infamy; but we do not forget that though Rome endeavors to hide the fact of its deeds from the world at large, it has never confessed one crime or expressed one word of sorrow for the blood it has shed, and that whether in the rò‚le of murderer or liar that Church is ever Holy Rome!