St. Bartholomew’s day Massacre

The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day is a history of unparalleled atrocity when according to some writers 100,000 were killed. In Paris alone, the blood of over 10,000 innocent Protestants citizens, deluged the streets, and for a whole week the shouts of ‘Kill, kill,’ resounded on every hand… These Protestants perished on account of their faith, in August 1572. …Pope Gregory XIII, who was privy to the plot, celebrated a Te Deum on hearing the news, ordered a jubilee and a solemn procession which he accompanied himself, to thank God for this glorious success… He had a medal struck in memory of the happy event, and a picture of the Massacre painted and hung in the Vatican…

Pope Gregory XIII’s coin commemorates the slaughter of innocents.

A century after this a worse persecution began in France against the Protestants. A Huguenot historian writes of it: ‘Never did hell in the direst persecution invent or employ means so diabolical and inhuman as the dragoons, and the monks who head them, have used to destroy us.’

Pope Clement XI did all in his power to secure their utter extinction. For three years this cruel crusade continued till the Protestants were completely crushed.

Look at Ireland in 1641, when the Romanist Bishops proclaimed a ‘war of religion’ and incited the people by every means in their power to massacre the Protestants. North, south, east, and west, throughout the island, Protestant blood flowed in rivers. Popish children were taught to pluck out the eyes of their Protestant playmates, to hack their little limbs and hunt them to death. Some were forced to murder their own relatives, and they then were butchered themselves over the bleeding remains; the last sounds that reached their dying ears being the savage assurance of the priests that these agonies were but the commencement of eternal torment.

In Armagh 4000 Protestants were drowned; in Cavan, the road for twelve miles together was stained red with the gory track of the wounded fugitives. In Ulster upward of 154,000 Protestants were massacred or expelled from Ireland. O’Neil, the Romish Primate of all Ireland, declared this rebellion to be ‘a pious and lawful war, ‘and Pope Urban VIII by a bull, dated May 1643, granted ‘full and absolute remission of all their sins,’ to those who had taken part in it.’

… As some Emperors of Rome exhausted the art of pleasure, so have Romanish persecutors exhausted all the arts of pain, so that it will now be difficult to discover or invent a new kind of it, which they have not already practiced upon heretics.

They have been shot, stabbed, stoned, drowned, beheaded, hanged, drawn, quartered, impaled, burnt, or buried alive, roasted on spits, baked in ovens, thrown into furnaces, tumbled over precipices, cast from the tops of towers, sunk in mire, and pits, starved with hunger and cold, hung on tenter hooks, suspended by the hair of the head, by the hands or feet, stuffed and blown up by gunpowder, ripped with swords and sickles, tied to the tails of horses, dragged over streets and sharp flints, broken on the wheel, beaten on anvils with hammers, blown with bellows, bored with hot irons, torn piecemeal by red-hot pincers, slashed with knives, hacked with axes, hewed with chisels, pricked with forks, stuck from head to foot with pins; choked with water, lime, rags, urine, excrement, or mangled pieces of their own bodies crammed down their throats, shut up in caves and dungeons, tied to stakes, nailed to trees, tormented with lighted matches, scalding oil, burning pitch, melted lead, etc.

They have been flayed alive, had their flesh scalped and torn from their bones; they have been trampled and danced upon till their bowels have been forced out; their entrails have been tied to trees and pulled forth by degrees; their heads twisted with cords till the blood or even the eyes started out; strings have been drawn through their noses and they led about like swine and butchered like sheep.

To dig out eyes, tear off nails, cut off ears, lips, tongues, arms, breast, etc., has been but an ordinary sport with Rome’s converters and holy butchers. Persons have been compelled to lay violent hands to their dearest friends, to kill or to cast into fire their parents, husband, wives, children, etc., or to look on while they have been most cruelly and shamefully abused. Women and young maids have also suffered such barbarities, accompanied with all the imaginable indignities, insults, shame and pungent pangs to which their sex could expose them. Tender babes have been whipped, starved, drowned, stabbed and burnt to death, dashed against trees and stones, torn limb from limb carried about of the points of spikes and spears and thrown to the dogs and swine.

Let the impartial and unbiased reader consider this evidence and weigh it well, comparing it carefully with the prophetic picture of Antichrist and he will be overwhelmingly convinced that it fulfills all the terrible demands of prophecy. And remember, Rome has never repented of these things…

If such treatment as this, inflected on successive generations of Disciples of Christ, for centuries together be not ‘wearing out of the saint of the Most High,’ what could be? History affords no parallel, for the Pagan persecutions were brief in comparison to the Papal.