ine de Medici, lured immense numbers of the innocent
Hugenots into the city under the pretext of witnessing a marriage
between the Hugenot Henry, king of Navarre, and the sister of Charles
IX., king of France--when the gates were closed and the work of
wholesale slaughter began at a given signal and raged for three days,
during which time from six to ten thousand were butchered in Paris
alone! Think of the rivers of blood in the Netherlands, where the Duke
of Alva boasted that in the short space of six weeks he had put eighteen
thousand to death! Witness the dragoonading methods and other inhuman
persecutions to "wear out the saints of the Most High," that followed
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) by Louis XIV., king of
France, during whose reign three hundred thousand were brutally
butchered--while Pope Innocent XI. extolled the king by special letter
as follows: "The Catholic church shall most assuredly record in her
sacred annals a _work of such devotion toward her_, and CELEBRATE YOUR
NAME WITH NEVER-DYING PRAISES ... for _this most excellent
undertaking_"!! My heart sickens with horror in the contemplation of
such events. Eternal God! can thy righteous eye behold such
heart-rending scenes of earth, and thy hand of power not be extended to
humble to the dust these cruel, haughty oppressors of thy people?

12. And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo,
there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as
sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;

13. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a
fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a
mighty wind.

14. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled
together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their
places.

15. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich
men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every
bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in
the rocks of the mountains;

16. And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us
from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the
wrath of the Lamb;

17. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be
able to stand?

Upon the opening of this seal the scene changes again. The symbols are
all drawn from an entirely different source. We are taken out of the
department of civil life i