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We are in one of the worst, if not the worst time for persecution against Christians.
Once the Middle East was populated by Christians, but today Muslims form the majority. What happened? History testifies that Christians have been slaughtered or forced to convert to Islam. The Ottoman Empire and Turkey is guilty of genocide. But this tribulation is happening today and it might be the worst time in history to be a Christian.
Of course the Bible says that terrible times will come and they have. But today could be the worst time in history.
Do you know why we talk about it LESS ?
DANIEL 7
verse 25 – Wore out the saints
Pagan Rome killed an estimated three million Christians, while historians estimate that the Papacy has been responsible for no less than 50 million!
This Great Tribulation covered the period called the Dark Ages (Matt 24:21- 22).
Augustine laid the foundation for the church to persecute heretics, He wrote:
“Originally my opinion was that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ, that we must act only by words, fight only by arguments, and prevail by force of reason, lest we should have those whom we knew as avowed heretics feigning themselves to be Catholics. But this opinion of mine was overcome…” St. Augustine, Letter 93 (to Vincentius), chap. 5, sec. 17, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, Vol. I, p388.
“The Catholic church has persecuted…We have always defended the persecution of the Hugenots, and the Spanish Inquisi- tion…When she thinks it good to use physical force, she will use it.” A Roman Catholic publication, The Western Watchman, of St Louis, Dec. 24, 1908.
“Torture was little used from the 9th to 12th centuries, but with the revival of Roman law the process was re-established in the 12th century…In 1252 [Pope] Innocent IV sanctioned the infliction of torture by the civil authorities upon heretics, and torture came to have a recognized place in the procedures of the inquisitorial courts.” New Catholic Encyclopaedia, art. Torture.
“The civil authorities, therefore, were en- joined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake.” Joseph Blotzer, article, ʻInquisitionʼ, Catholic Encycloedia, Vol. VIII, p34.
“Cursed be they who assert liberty of con- science and of worship, and such as main- tain the church should not employ force. The State has not the right to leave every man free to embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.” Pope Pius IXʼs Encyclical and Syllabus (Dec. 8, 1864).
THE FORGOTTEN HUGUENOT HOLOCAUST—ONE-HALF
MILLION TRUE CHRISTIAN MEN, WOMEN AND
CHILDREN SLAUGHTERED BY FRENCH DRAGOONSJohn Ridpath further documents that when it was: “…agreed that the whole scheme of toleration, which had been devised and
proclaimed in April of 1598 by Henry of Navarre as the fundamental condition of the religious peace of France, should be reversed and abrogated, to the end that Catholic absolutism might be reëstablished throughout the kingdom.
“After certain prepatory steps, such as local persecutions of the Huguenots, the shutting up of their churches in various places, and
their expulsion from public offices, an edict was finally prepared for
the purpose of destroying French Protestantism at a single stroke. All Protestants were ordered to abjure their religion and return to the communion of Rome under penalty of having their property
confiscated and themselves put beyond the protection of the law. Nor was the measure coupled with the poor provision for voluntary exile. Instead of permitting the Huguenots to go into self-banishment in foreign lands the most stringent orders were given to prevent their escape from France. It was decreed that any who should be caught in such an attempt should be sent to the galleys. Troops of dragoons were then sent into the districts where the Huguenots lived and a persecution was organized against them which has been made perpetually infamous in history under the name of the Dragonade. The minister Louvois declared the will of the king to be that the greatest rigor should be visited on those who would not adopt his religion, and that such stupid vanity on the part of the Huguenots should be pursued to the last extremity.
“The king’s dragoons were accordingly ordered to quarter at will in the houses of those who refused to give up the religion in which they had been nurtured. One cruelty succeeded another. Menace was followed by imprisonment, imprisonment by isolated murders, and these by general and brutal massacres. The Huguenot peasants were hunted into the woods like wild beasts and were shot down or tortured at the caprice of their persecutors. Neither the decrepitude of old age nor the pleading weakness of infancy stirred any remorse in the breasts of the bloody butchers who went about cutting down all ages, sexes, and conditions….The regions where the Huguenot population predominated were reduced to a desolation, and it is estimated that France by her frightful barbarity to her own people lost fully half a million of her most industrious inhabitants….”6969 John Clark Ridpath, Cyclopædia of Universal History, p. 822-823.
……..
ROMAN CATHOLICISM’S WORLDWIDE
ATTACK ON PROTESTANTSOrganizational Catholicism and its armies reduced large populations of innocent people to rubble in their attempts to maintain power throughout the world. In some cases, over three-quarters of the population was destroyed by some of the most horrifying torture imaginable. This kind of onslaught cannot be called anything less than a holocaust. Henry Halley, addressing these events, informs us: “In Bohemia, by 1600, in a population of 4,000,000, 80 per cent were Protestant. When the Hapsburgs and Jesuits had done their work, 800,000 were left, all Catholics.
In Austria and Hungary half the population Protestant, but under the Hapsburgs and Jesuits they were slaughtered.
In Poland, by the end of the 16th century, it seemed as if Romanism was about to be entirely swept away, but here, too, the Jesuits, by persecution, killed Reform.
In Italy, the Pope’s own country, the Reformation was getting a real hold; but the Inquisition got busy, and hardly a trace of Protestantism was left.
In Spain the Reformation never made much headway, because
the Inquisition was already there. Every effort for freedom or independent thinking was crushed with a ruthless hand. Torquemada (1420-98), a Dominican monk, arch-inquisitor, in 18 years burned 10,200 and condemned to perpetual imprisonment 97,000. Victims were usually burned alive in the public square; made the occasion of religious festivities. From 1481 to 1808 there were at least 100,000 martyrs and 1,500,000 banished. ‘In the 16th and 17th centuries the Inquisition extinguished the literary life of Spain, and put the nation almost outside the circle of European civilization’….In 50 years the Reformation had swept Europe, with most of Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Poland in its grasp; and making headway in France. This was a terrific blow to the Roman Church, which, in turn, organized the Counter-Reformation; and by means of the Council of Trent (in
session 18 years, 1545-63)….Rome was organized for an aggressive onslaught on Protestantism; and under the brilliant and brutal leadership of the Jesuits regained much of the lost territory; South Germany, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Belgium, and crushed the Reformation in France. Within a hundred years, by 1689, the Counter-Reformation had spent its force. The principal Rulers who fought the Pope’s Wars were: Charles V (1519-56) of Spain, against German Protestants; Philip II (1556-98), of Spain, against Holland, England; Ferdinand II (1619-37), of Austria, against Bohemians; Catherine de Medici, mother of three kings of France, Francis II (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74), Henry III (1574-89), in the wars for the extermination of French Huguenots.
The Reformation movement was followed by a hundred years of religious war: 1. War on the German Protestants (1546-55); 2. War on the Protestants of the Netherlands (1566-1609); 3. Huguenot Wars in France (1572-98); 4. Philip’s attempt against England (1588); 5. Thirty Years War (1618-48). In these wars political and national rivalries were involved, as well as questions of property, for the Church in most countries owned one-third to one-fifth of all lands. But every one of these wars was STARTED by Roman Catholic Kings, urged on by Pope and Jesuit, for the purpose of crushing Protestantism. They were the Aggressors. The Protestants were on the Defensive. Dutch, German nor French Protestants became Political Parties till after years of persecution….The number of Martyrs under Papal Persecutions far outnumbered the Early Christian Martyrs under Pagan Rome: hundreds of thousands among the Albigenses, Waldenses, and Protestants of Germany, Netherlands, Bohemia and other countries. It is common to excuse the Popes in this matter by saying that it was the ‘spirit of the age.’ Whose age was it? and who made it so? The Popes. It was their world. For 1000 years they had been training the world to be in subjection to them. If the Popes had not taken the Bible from the people, the people would have known better, and it would NOT have been….”72
Halley further documents that the Roman Catholics martyred “untold millions”73 of innocent people because they chose to be Protestant and follow Jesus according to the New Testament.72 Henry H. Halley, Halley’s Bible Handbook, pp. 790, 792-793.
73 Ibid, p. 793.
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