CHAPTER - PRELIMINARY STATEMENT OF THE TESTIMONY OF REINERIUS RESPECTING THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES, WITH REMARKS ON THEIR DIALECT AND THEIR OWN CONCURRING TRADITIONS.

BUT it is time, that I should leave the much persecuted and calumniated Albigenses, to introduce a pure and never-reformed Church still older than that of the Paulicians.

The Church, to which I allude, is that of the Vallenses of Piedmont: and, in order to my purpose of connecting the Churches of the Reformation with the Church of the Primitive Ages, the two points of its Remote Antiquity and of its Evangelical-Purity must be successively considered.

Agreeably, then, to the present arrangement, the point of its Remote Antiquity will first come under discussion.

This topic requires the production of a continued line of witnesses through the whole period of what are usually called the Middle Ages. But, before I enter directly upon such a production, the decisive general testimony of Reinerius Sacco a well-informed Inquisitor who flourished during the earlier part of the thirteenth century, associated with the dialect and traditions of the Vallenses themselves, may, under the aspect of preliminary matter, be usefully and properly brought forward.

I. The following is the testimony of Reinerius. Concerning the sects of ancient heretics, observe, that there have been more than seventy: all of which, except the sects of the Manicheans and the Arians and the Runcarians and the Leonists which have infected Germany, have, through the favor of God, been destroyed. Among all these sects, which either still exist or which have formerly existed, there is not one more pernicious to the Church than that of the Leonists: and this, for three reasons. The first reason is; because It has been of longer continuance: for some say, that it bas lasted from the time of Sylvester; others, from the time of the Apostles.

The second reason is; because, It is more general: for there is scarcely any land, in which this sect exists not. The third reason is; because, While all other sects, through the immanity of their blasphemies against God, strike horror into the hearers, this of the Leonists has a great semblance of piety; inasmuch as they live justly before men, and believe, together with all the Articles contained in the Creed, every point well respecting the Deity: only they blaspheme the Roman Church and Clergy; to which the multitude of the Laity are ready enough to give credence. 1. I have adduced this passage for the purpose of exhibiting Reinerius, as attesting the remote antiquity of the Vallenses of Piedmont. Yet, by name, he mentions not, in it, the Vallenses: he speaks only of a body of contemporary religionists, whom he denominates Leonists. These, in regard to the origin of the sect, he carries back to a very distant period: and, at the same time, he broadly distinguishes them from the Albigenses or Cathari, whom he here simply alludes to under the names of Manicheans and Runcarians, but whom he afterward fully describes under the systematic charge of being deeply tainted with the Manichean Heresy.

Hence, to make his attestation at all available to my purpose, I have to show: that the Leonists, whom he thus characterizes, were the Vallenses or Valdenses or Vaudois of Piedmont.

My proof, then, runs in manner following.

Reinerius, a writer of the thirteenth century, tells us: that, In the judgment of some inquirers, the Leonists had existed from the time of Pope Sylvester.

Pilichdorf, another writer of the thirteenth century, tells us’ that The persons, who claimed to have thus existed from the time of Pope Sylvester, were the Valdenses. And Claude Scyssel, who was Archbishop of Turin at the latter end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, who lived in the immediate neighborhood of the Valdenses of Piedmont, and who in fact comprehended them within the geographical limits of his province, tells us. that The Valdenses of Piedmont derived themselves from a person named Leo; who, in the time of the Emperor Constantine, execrating the avarice of Pope Sylvester and the immoderate endowment of the Roman Church, seceded from that communion, and drew after him all those who entertained right sentiments concerning the Christian Religion. Thus we have the Valdenses of Piedmont standing in direct connection, not only with the tradition respecting Sylvester, but likewise with an individual from whose name the title of Leonists has plainly and almost avowedly been deduced.

Such a combination of circumstances evidently brings out the result: that The Valdenses and the Leonists were the same.

Whence, of course, it follows: that, In ascribing a most remote antiquity to the Leonists, Reinerius, in fact, ascribes it to the Valdenses. 2. Since, then, the Valdenses were occasionally denominated Leonists from an individual named Leo, who must have lived in a far distant age because some traditions made him even a contemporary of Sylvester and Constantine: an inquiry, as to Who this Leo was, will at least afford a subject for a somewhat curious investigation.

On that subject, I purpose now to enter: and it will probably be found to bear not a little closely upon a matter of testimony which will be the topic of a future discussion.

That any Leo was the founder of the Vallensic Church, as Claude not quite accurately (I suspect) reports the tradition, cannot be allowed: for the tradition, thus reported, agrees not with the standing belief of the Vaudois, that their Communion descends in a direct unbroken line from the Apostles. But, that, at some remote period, they had among them an eminent teacher, who was distinguished by the appellation of Leo, and from whom they themselves were sometimes denominated Leonists, is a matter so highly probable, that I can see no reason why we should hastily reject such a supposition. At all events, we seem by chronology itself prohibited from deriving, as some have done, the name of Leonists from the town of Lyons on the Rhone: that is to say, if, for such derivation, we take the specific ground that Peter of Lyons, in the twelfth century, communicated, from the town, the name of Leonists to his own peculiar disciples. For, according to the plain and natural import of the language used by Reinerius, the very ancient Vallenses were already called Leonists long before the time of Peter of Lyons: inasmuch as he intimates, that Peter’s disciples, the Poor Men of Lyons, were also, as well as the ancient sect of which they were a branch and respecting which he had treated in the immediately preceding section of his Work, denominated Leonists. Yet, though I think it clear that the Valdenses could not have been called Leonists from the Lyons of the opulent merchant Peter, that is to say, from the Lyons which is seated upon the Rhone: I am not without a strong suspicion, that, ultimately, and through an entirely different channel, the title may have been borrowed from another Lyons; from Lyons, to wit, in Aquitaine, upon the borders of the Pyrenees; from the Lugdunum Convenarum, I mean, which now bears the name of St. Bertrand, and which is situated in what (from Convenae) is styled the Pays de Cominges. My conjecture is: that the traditional Leo of the Valdenses, however his history may have been circumstantially distorted and chronologically misplaced, is no other than the famous Vigilantius; of whom, in immediate connection with the primitive Christians of the Valleys at the beginning of the fifth century, we shall presently hear again.

This holy man, as we fortunately learn from the very scurrility of Jerome, was actually born in the precise town of Lyons or Convenae in Aquitaine. Whence, from the place of his nativity, he would obviously be called, among his hosts of the valleys, Vigilantius Leo or Vigilantius the Leonist.

His proper local appellation he communicated, if I mistake not, to his congenial friends, the Vallenses of Piedmont; and his memory, as we see, was affectionately cherished by them, down even to the time of Claude Scyssel.

Thus ultimately, I apprehend, the name of Leonist was derived from Lyons: not, indeed, from the more celebrated Lyons on the Rhone; but from the Lyons of Aquitaine, or the Lugdunum Convenarum of the Pyrenees. 3. The importance of the testimony of Reinerius, to the apostolically remote antiquity of the Piedmontese Vallenses, is so great, that we shall not wonder at the circumstance of its being made the subject of a quibble on the part of the Jesuit Gretser.

He remarks’ that Reinerius, not on the authority of his own careful inquiries or pursuant to his own well-founded conviction, but purely on the hearsay statements of other persons, ascribes to the Leonists an antiquity, which reaches to the time of Sylvester or even to the time of the Apostles themselves. So far as it extends, this observation, no doubt is true. But Gretser took good care to stop short where he did, cautiously eschewing all notice of what Reinerius says in b is own person; and thence plainly omitting the whole of what he says, as the result of his own inquiries and as the amount of his own conviction.

The direct and positive testimony, then, of Reinerius, speaking in his own person and not merely reciting the opinions of others, runs to the following effect.

He assures us: that The Leonists were, as a sect, older, than either the Manicheans or the Arians or the Runcarians or any one of the more than seventy sects of heretics that had once existed. And he assigns this, their undoubted high antiquity, as the first and foremost of the three special reasons why they were so injurious to the Church of Rome.

Now the Manicheans, even if we say nothing of the allied sects of the Gnostics and the Docetae and the Valentinians and the Marcionites, were certainly as early as the third century.

Therefore the Leonists, inasmuch as Reinerius pronounces them to be still older than the Manicheans, must, according to the result of his inquiries and the sum of his conviction, inevitably be viewed, as running up to an antiquity not less than that of the third and second centuries: a circumstance, which at once places them in the times of the Primitive Church. II. Agreeably to this conclusion, the very necessity of their ancient dialect, corroborated as the evidence is by their own unvarying tradition, throws back their original retirement into the Valleys of Piedmont, exactly to the period marked out by the personal inquiries of Reinerius. 1. I should not have ventured to hazard such a remark on my own authority’ but I certainly may lay some considerable stress upon the decision of a scientific inquirer into the Monuments of the Roman Tongue, who had no object to serve beyond the general objects of perfectly independent literature.

The dialect of the Vaudois, as we are assured by Raynouard, is an intermediate idiom, between the decomposition of the tongue spoken by the Romans, and the establishment of a new grammatical system. It must, therefore, be philologically viewed, as a primitively derivative language-that is to say, it must be viewed, as a language, derived, without any intervention of an older derivative language, from the decomposed stock of its parent Latin.

On this principle, when speaking of the Noble Lesson which bears in its text the date of the year 1100 and which thence is more ancient than the greater part of the writings of the Troubadours, he says’ The language seems to me to be of an epoch already far separated from its original formation; inasmuch as we may remark the suppression of some final consonants · a peculiarity, which announces, that the words of the longspoken dialect bad already lost some portion of their primitive terminations. Circumstances of this nature plainly refer the formation of the Vaude from the Latin to a period of most remote antiquity: and thus, by a necessary consequence, refer also the settlement of the Vaudois themselves to the same remote period; forbidding the supposition, that they might have retired to their Alpine Valleys, after what Raynouard calls the establishment of a new grammatical system, and after the origination of a language derived only at second hand from the Latin.

Hence, the primevally Latin Vaudois must have retired, from the lowlands of Italy to the valleys of Piedmont, in the very days of primitive Christianity and before the breaking up of the Roman Empire by the persevering incursions of the Teutonic Nations.

But it is scarcely probable, that men would leave their homes, the fair and warm and fertile country of Italy, for the wildness of desolate mountains and for the squalidity of neglected valleys; valleys, which would require all the severe labor of assiduous cultivation; and mountains, which no labor could make productive: unless some very paramount and overbearing cause had constrained them to undertake such an emigration.

Now a cause, precisely of this description, we have in the persecutions, which, during the second and third and fourth centuries, occurred under the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Maximin and Decius and Valerian and Diocletian.

Therefore, both from the philological necessity of their language, and from the tenacity with which they have always maintained their primeval religion, we can scarcely doubt, that the Christians, who fled from persecution during those centuries, were the true ancestors of the Vaudois. 2. This opinion, accordingly, has ever prevailed among themselves, down, as we may say, even to the present time. (1.) To such a purpose, for instance, speaks the celebrated Henry Arnold: who, in the emergency of the period, half clerk and half soldier, superintended the glorious re-entrance of the Vaudois into their native country during the year 1689.

That their religion is as primitive as their name is venerable, is attested even by their adversaries. Reinerius the Inquisitor, in a report made by him to the Pope on the subject of their faith, expresses himself in these words: that They have existed from time immemorial. It would not be difficult to prove, that this poor band of the faithful were in the Valleys of Piedmont more than four centuries before the appearance of those extraordinary personages, Luther and Calvin and the subsequent lights of the Reformation.

Neither has their Church been ever reformed: whence arises its title of EVANGELIC. The Vaudois are, in fact, descended from those refugees from Italy who, after St. Paul had there preached the Gospel, abandoned their beautiful country; and fled, like the woman mentioned in the Apocalypse, to these wild mountains, where they have, to this day, handed down the Gospel, from father to son, in the same purity and simplicity as it was preached by St.

Paul. (2.) To the same purpose, likewise, speaks their historian Boyer.

O marvelous! God, through his wise providence, has preserved the purity of the Gospel in the Valleys of Piedmont, from the time of the Apostles down to our own time. (3.) To the same purpose, again, they themselves speak collectively in the Confession, which they presented to Francis I of France in the year 1544.

This Confession is that, which we have received from our ancestors, even from hand to hand, according as their predecessors, in all times and in every age, have taught and delivered. (4.) Still, moreover, to the same purpose, they speak in the year 1559, when they delivered their supplication to Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy.

Let your highness consider, that this religion, in which we live, is not merely our religion of the present day or a religion discovered for the first time only a few years ago, as our enemies falsely pretend: but it is the religion of our fathers and of our grandfathers, yea of our forefathers and of our predecessors still more remote. It is the religion of the Saints and of the Martyrs, of the Confessors and of the Apostles. (5.) So again, when addressing themselves to the Reformers of the sixteenth century, they still harmoniously put forth the same traditional assertion of an apostolical antiquity: while, in point of knowledge and attainments, poor and secluded as they had long been, they modestly confess their own inferiority to the well-instructed teachers whose notice and assistance they solicit.

Our ancestors have often recounted to us, that we have existed from the time of the Apostles. In all matters, nevertheless, we agree with you: and, thinking as: you think, from the very days of the Apostles themselves we have ever been concordant respecting’ the faith. In this particular only, we may be said to offer from you; that, through our own fault, and the slowness of our genius, we do not understand the sacred writers with such strict correctness as yourselves. (6.) Finally, it is remarked by Leger: that, when, to the Princes of the House of Savoy, they perpetually asserted the uniformity of their faith, from father to son, through time immemorial, even from the very age of the Apostles; those sovereigns always maintained a profound silence respecting such an allegation: a circumstance, which, as he reasonably enough observes, sufficiently indicates their internal consciousness of its accuracy. 13 CHAPTER - THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES SHEWN FROM THE TESTIMONY OF JEROME THUS, during the persecutions of the second and third and fourth centuries, placed in the valleys of the Cottian Alps as in a citadel fashioned by the hand of nature herself, we find the Vallenses, in the selfsame region, still holding the self-same primitive doctrine and practice at the beginning of the fifth century: while, by so doing, they characteristically bore witness against those growing superstitions, from which, by their secluded situation, they had been providentially exempted.

The account of this matter, which I place at the head of the chain of testimony that runs through the whole period of the Middle Ages, is both deeply interesting and specially important, inasmuch as it furnishes the precise link which has long been wanted, in order, on the strength of evidence, synchronical with the particulars detailed, to connect the Vaudois with the Primitive Church: and it will not, I hope, argue an unreasonable degree of assumption, if I say, that, so far as my own knowledge and reading are concerned, I have been privileged to be the first discoverer of the evidence in question. I. Vigilantius, a native (as we have seen) of Lugdunum Convenarum or of the Pyrenean Lyons in Aquitaine, and a Presbyter of the Church of Barcelona in Spain, had charged Jerome with too great a leaning to the objectionable opinions of Origen. This circumstance called forth the rage of the irascible Father: and, in the year 397, he addressed to him a very violent epistle on the subject. Subsequently to the propounding of that epistle. Vigilantius returned into his native country of Aquitaine. and there he published a most uncompromising and decisive Treatise against the miserable growing superstitions of the age; a Treatise, which is ascribed to the year 406.

In this Treatise, he attacked the notion, that Celibacy is the duty of the Clergy: censured, as idolatrous, the excessive veneration of the Martyrs and the idle unscriptural figment that they are potent intercessors at the throne of grace: ridiculed the blind reverence, which was paid to their senseless and useless relics: exposed the gross folly of burning tapers, like the Pagans, before their shrines in broad day-light: detected the spurious miracles, which were said to be wrought by their inanimate remains: vilified the boasted sanctity of vainly gratuitous monachism: and pointed out the useless absurdity of pilgrimages, either to Jerusalem or to any other reputed sanctuary. Such was the drift of his Treatise’ and, ill the course of it, he naturally adverted to Jerome’s former indecent attack upon him.

Matters being in this state, Jerome wrote a very intemperate and abusive epistle, addressed to Riparius: and, shortly afterward, receiving the Treatise itself, he composed an Answer to it; in which, it is hard to say, whether illogical absurdity or brutal scurrility is the most predominant. From those documents, we fully learn the drift and object of the now lost Treatise of Vigilantius the Leonist: and the author, as will readily be concluded, has had the honor of being, by the Papal Church, duly enrolled in the list of heretics.

II. To the ecclesiastical student, the sentiments of Vigilantius are familiar: and their complete identity with those of the Vallenses, in all ages, cannot have escaped his notice. But, when this remarkable individual quitted Barcelona, from what part of the world did he publish the very seasonable Treatise, which called forth such vulgar and offensive vituperation from the superstitious and exasperated Jerome?

His antagonist tells us’ that He wrote from a region, ‘situated between the waves of the Adriatic and the Alps of King Cottius; from a region, that is to say, which formed a part of what was once styled Cisalpine Gaul. Now this district, on the eastern side of the Cottian Alps, is the precise country of the Vallenses. Hither their ancestors retired, during the persecutions of the second and third and fourth centuries’ here, providentially secluded from the world, they retained the precise doctrines and practices of the Primitive Church endeared to them by suffering and exile; while the wealthy inhabitants of cities and fertile plains, corrupted by a now opulent and gorgeous and powerful Clergy, were daily sinking deeper and deeper into that apostasy which has been so graphically foretold by the great Apostle: and, here, as we learn through the medium of an accidental statement of Jerome, Vigilantius took up his abode, at the beginning of the fifth century, among a people, who, Laics and Bishops alike, agreed with him in his religious sentiments, and joyfully received him as a brother. In his Epistle to Riparius, Jerome thinks it expedient to marvel: that the holy Bishop, within whose Alpine Diocese Vigilantius was then residing as a Presbyter, did not crush so useless a vessel with a well-aimed blow from the iron rod of Apostolicity. 7 But, alas, in his subsequent Tractate against the audacious heretic, the unwelcome truth comes out: and the reason of such forbearance stands forth, upon the historical canvass, most prominent and most abundantly manifest. The two superstitious bigots, indeed, Riparius and Desiderius, who seem to have dwelt upon the frontiers of the spiritual Goshen of the Valleys, complained heavily to Jerome, that their neighboring Parishes or Dioceses were polluted, forsooth, by such an unsavory vicinage: and it was charitably added, that, with Satan’s own banner in his hand, Vigilantius, albeit, in the punning phraseology of the facetious Saint, a very Dormitantius, was making, from his aerial station, successful inroads upon the slumbering Churches of the Gauls. 8 But with respect to the Bishops, evidently the Bishops of the alpine district where the zealously active Leonist sojourned; they, however nefandous it might appear to Jerome and his correspondents, however it might elicit a piteous groan from the heaving bosom of the sorely distressed Father, however it might provoke a lamentable Proh nefas duly to be re-echoed by Desiderius and Riparius: they, the Bishops of the country between the Adriatic Sea and the Cottian Alps, perfectly agreed with the misnamed heretic; and, on one special point of difference between the controvertists, actually preferred the ordination of husbands to the ordination of bachelors; nay, if we rigidly interpret the inflated language of Jerome, absolutely made antecedent matrimony a sine quo non to the ordination even of a Deacon. But this is not all Rome herself, towering in her sacerdotal potency, was not to escape unscathed. In the Tractate of Jerome, we have a case, perhaps the earliest case upon record, of a Leonistic Presbyter, himself the long remembered and long venerated Leo of Vallensic tradition, supported by the Bishops of a whole people, and, in that support, standing directly opposed to the Roman Pontiff, and to all those other Bishops who were blindly following him in his now-rapidly developing predicted apostasy.

Jerome, nurtured in the adulterate Christianity of opulent cities and fanatic monks and lordly prelates, is amazed, yea horrified, at the alpine audacity of Vigilantius. That stubborn son of the Pyrenean Lyons, who seems to have troubled his head very little about any doctrinal authority save that of Scripture, was unable thence to discover the vital importance of consecrating the Eucharist over the bones of Peter and of Paul, that rich and boasted treasure of Rome Ecclesiastical: whence, a fortiori, he could not be expected to entertain any very particular reverence for the less holy fragments of less important dead men and women. What, cries Jerome, scandalized to the last pitch of endurance, does the Roman Bishop, ‘then, do ill, who offers sacrifices to the Lord over the bones of dead men; the bones, I trow, of Peter and of Paul: bones, in our estimation, venerable; bones, in thy estimation, a mere worthless portion of dust? Does the Bishop of Rome do ill, who deems their tombs the altars of Christ? Are the Bishops, not merely of a single city, but of the whole world, all mistaken: because, despising the huckster Vigilantius, they reverently enter into the stately cathedrals of the dead. Truly, a rapid declaimer ought to be blessed with a good memory. Only two pages before, and in the course of the very same Tractate, Jerome had been groaning over Bishops, not indeed (as he remarks) to be called Bishops, who were the sworn allies and associates of the desperately wicked Vigilantius: and now he discovers, that all the Bishops of all the world, with the Pope of Rome at their head, are fiat against the heretic.

But, though Jerome may forget the important fact which he has recorded, others will remember it. Those, who adhere to the catholic doctrines of the Primitive Church as they stand broadly opposed to unscriptural popish additaments, will recollect, that Vigilantius was not an insulated and unsupported witness to the sincerity of the Gospel. A whole people, with their Bishops and Clergy at their head, were his associates: and the recorded abode of this whole people was a mountainous district between the Adriatic Sea and the Cottian Alps.

CHAPTER - THE ANTIQVITY OF THE VALLENSES SHEWN FROM THE TESTIMONY RECORDED BY PILICHDORF WITH fearful rapidity, the deluge of Teutonic Invasion was now rising to overwhelm the whole Western Roman Empire: and a period of well nigh two centuries elapsed, ere its tumultuous streams of many cognate peoples began to subside into a state of comparative tranquillity.

But the Alpine Retreat of the Primitive Christians, more highly privileged than the submerged Ararat of old, reared its head above the flood, and preserved its sacred deposit amidst the mighty world of waters which rolled harmlessly at its feet.

Whenever the Gothic Nations precipitated themselves upon Italy, their line of march was invariably across either the Rhaetian Alps or the Julian Alps: nor have I been able to find, that the Cottian Alps ever came within the sphere of their operations. Under Providence, the peculiar locality of this mountain range procured its exemption: and thus, in the midst of the storm, the Vallenses were securely housed within its difficult and sequestered recesses.

At length, all the ten fated kingdoms were erected by the ten principal Gothic Tribes’ and, as the historian speaks, the victorious nations of Germany established a new system of manners and government in the western countries of Europe. 1 Then, the revolution being completed, we forthwith hear of the divinely preserved Church in the wilderness.

The tenth and last Gothic Kingdom, that of the Lombards, was founded, upon the soil of Italy, in the year 567 and 568. and, about three centuries after Constantine or at the commencement of the seventh age, the Vallenses again demand our attention.

At this time, another celebrated and long remembered pastor, a worthy successor of the older Leonistic pastor Vigilantius, appeared among them.

His name was Peter’ and, in the recorded appellation of the country where he sprang up, we first, so far as I know, meet with the geographically descriptive title of Valdenses or Vallenses or Men of the Valleys. For the preservation of this piece of Valdensic history, handed down among the Alpine mountaineers themselves, and from them communicated to the Valdenses of France, we are indebted to Peter Pilichdorf: who, in the thirteenth century, exhibited himself, as their bitter, though curiously inquisitive, enemy. They say, reports that writer: that, in the time of Constantine, a companion of Pope Sylvester, disliking the excessive enrichment of the Church by the donations of the Emperor, and on that account separating himself from Sylvester, maintained the way of poverty: asserting, that the true Church was continued in the line of his own adherents, and that Sylvester with his adherents had fallen away from the true Church. Furthermore, they say: that, at the end of three hundred years from the time of Constantine, a certain person, named Peter, sprang up from a region called Valdis; who similarly taught the way of poverty. From these two, originated the sect of the Valdenses. From the identity of name, it may be thought, that this Peter of Valdis, thus ascribed to the beginning of the seventh century, is a mere fabulous duplicate of the later and more celebrated Peter Valdo of Lyons; who, in consequence of some extraordinary chronological blunder, has, in this tradition, been thrown back more than five hundred years.

Such, when first I read the passage which mentions Peter of Valdis as living three centuries after Constantine, was the idea which naturally presented itself to my own mind. But I doubt, whether such an idea be correct. If there be any error in the statement, that error must inevitably be laid to the account, either of Pilichdorf individually, or of the Valdenses his informants collectively.

I. Now, with respect to Pilichdorf individually, he well knew (as, indeed, he distinctly tells us), that Peter Valdo of Lyons began his ministry in the days of Pope Innocent II. or about the year 1160 and, of this individual, he gives, from his own knowledge, a very full account, which exactly corresponds with the parallel account given by Reinerius. 4 Hence, I think it impossible, that Pilichdorf, thus fully informed, could ever have himself mis taken so widely, as to place Peter Valdo of Lyons in the seventh century under the appellation of Peter of Valdis.

No confusion, therefore, can reasonably be ascribed to Pilichdorf himself individually.

II. And, as for the Valdenses collectively, it is plainly no less impossible, that, in the thirteenth century or in the age when Pilichdorf received his information from them, they should ever have fallen into so gross a chronological mistake.

Persons, who were actually living in the thirteenth century, and who thence must have familiarly known the character and history of the pious merchant of Lyons, could never have ignorantly ascribed Peter Valdo, who notoriously flourished during the latter half of the twelfth century, to so remote a period as the very beginning of the seventh century: or, if they had made such an extraordinary mistake, it is plain, that, to the malignant Pilichdorf, it would have afforded a topic of immeasurable exultation and triumph.

But no such misapprehension, and consequently no such triumph, appears. In his Work against the Valdenses, Pilichdorf gives us his account of Peter the rich merchant of Lyons: and, in the extant fragment of his other Work written against the Poor Men of Lyons, he notices, without any imputation of a confused blunder, the standing tradition of the Valdenses, that another Peter of much higher antiquity had previously risen up in the region named Valdis; a region, which, by its very name evidently identifies itself with the country of the Valdenses in Piedmont.

Therefore, no confusion can reasonably be ascribed to the Valdenses collectively: and, therefore, we may safely conclude, that the Valdensic Peter of this tradition was not the Valdensic Peter of Lyons, but, as the tradition purports, an individual who flourished in the seventh century.

CHAPTER - THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES SHEWN FROM THE HISTORY OF CLAUDE OF TURIN DESCENDING with the stream of time, while corruption went on rapidly increasing through the provinces and in the rich towns of the now dislocated though partly restored Western Empire, we shall again, early in the ninth century, meet with the Piedmontese Vallenses in direct connection with their eminent Pastor, Claude, Bishop or Metropolitan of Turin.

I. Bossuet seems not quite to have made up his mind, as to whether Claude was an Arian or a Nestorian. One of the two, he confidently pronounces him to have been: and, so far as I can understand the ingenious Prelate, he rather in-dines to the charge of Arianism. His authority is Jonas, Bishop of Orleans: who, prudently waiting for the death of Claude, when he could offer no contradiction, brought the charge against him in the Preface to his work concerning the worship of images, addressed to Charles the Bald. The very vagueness of the allegation, which hovers between the asserted Nestorianism of his early friend Felix of Urgel and a pretended Arianism of which even his bitter enemy Dungal could discover no traces during his life, may well, even on the first blush, induce a full presumption that Claude was a favorer of neither heresy. Accordingly, in the Works of that remarkable man which have hitherto been brought to light, nothing whatever appears to inculpate him: while we find abundance, both to show his real sentiments, and also to explain why the Romish Priesthood have in his case diligently resorted to their old and familiar craft of abusive calumny.

A commentary on the epistle to the Galatians is the only one of his various writings, which has been published in full. But the Monks of St.

Germain had in manuscript his Commentaries upon all the Epistles, which were found in the Abbey of Fleury near Orleans; as also those on Leviticus, which formerly belonged to the Library of St. Remi at Rheims.

There exist likewise, both in England and elsewhere, several manuscript copies of his Commentary on St. Matthew. Papirius Masson, moreover, has published extracts from his Epistle to the Abbot Theutmir, which are prefixed to the violent attack of Dungal upon that Epistle, and which occur likewise in the Work of Jonas of Orleans written for the defense of images: and Mabillon has printed the dedication of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, addressed to the Emperor Louis the Pious.

Now, under such circumstances, could any real proof of heresy have been adduced from his writings, we should long since have heard of it: for, if Bossuet, from Claude’s own compositions to which he had easy access, could have established the truth of his random accusation, he was not a man to have contented himself with a meagre reference to the posthumous gossip of Jonas of Orleans.

II. I have mentioned a Work by Claude, his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, as having been published in full. That Work is now before me’ and a brief account of its character and contents will fitly introduce those subsequent remarks, which I shall have occasion to offer.

The Work itself is a composition of beautiful christian simplicity. From the superstitions of even the incomplete Popery of the ninth century, it is altogether free. And, throughout, with clearness and fidelity, it propounds the genuine doctrine of the Gospel.

So far as regards the claim of Rome, to the universal supremacy of Peter, and thence to the universal supremacy of his pretended successors the Latin Pontiffs, Claude maintains the equal authority of Peter and of Paul in their respective departments’ Peter being at the head of the mission to the Jews; and Paul, similarly and independently, being at the head of the mission to the Gentiles. The doctrine of man’s justification in all ages, through faith alone in the merits of Christ, and not by the works of the law whether ceremonial or moral, be strenuously asserts with the utmost fullness and unreserve and precision. He virtually, without hesitation, sets aside the imaginary infallibility of the Church: for on the grand article of justification, he pronounces; that, as the Galatians had swerved from the true faith, so the same lamentable departure might also be then observed in the existing Churches at large. With an evident reference to the state of religion in his own time, he declares; that, what constitutes heresy, is a departure from that interpretation of Scripture which the sense of the Holy Spirit demands: and he remarks, at the same time; that real heretics of this description may be found within, as well as without, the pale of the visible Church. Finally, in respect to the posthumous charge of Arianism brought against him, he uses language, which touches the very point that divided that heresy from the true catholic doctrine: the point, to wit, that Christ, by nature, not merely by adoption, is the Son of the Father; or, in other words, the specially discriminating point, that the Father and the Son are consubstantial. III. When the never-changing genius of Popery is considered, it will be obvious, that the bold advocacy of primitive truth in such a declining age could not, in an ecclesiastic of Claude’s high rank and influential character, pass without producing a considerable degree of annoyance to the pontifical faction: nor was he himself to be exempted from the calumnious imputation of being a presumptuous innovator, when, in reality, the proper innovators were the persons who assailed him simply because he was a steady adherent to the soundness of Apostolical antiquity.

You declare yourself to have been troubled, says he to the Abbot Theutmir, because a rumor respecting me has passed out of Italy through all the Gauls even to the very borders of Spain; as if I had been preaching up some new sect, contrary to the rule of the Catholic Faith: a matter, which is utterly and absolutely false. It is no marvel, however, that Satan’s members should say these things of me, since he proclaimed our very Head himself to be a seducer and a demoniac. I, who hold the unity, and who preach the truth, am teaching no new sect. On the contrary, sects and schisms and superstitions and heretics, I have always, so far as in me lies, crushed and opposed: and, through God’s help, will never cease to crush and oppose. But, certes, this trouble has come upon me, only because, when, sorely against my will, I undertook, at the command of Louis the Pious, the Burden of a Bishopric, and when, contrary to the order of truth, I found all the churches at Turin stuffed full of vile and accursed images, I alone began to destroy what all were sottishly worshipping. Therefore it was, that all opened their mouths to revile me: and, forsooth, had not the Lord helped me, they would have swallowed me up quick. IV. This universalizing language, however, must be viewed, as respecting one division only of the pious Bishop’s people. The citizens of Turin and the inhabitants of the low country were vehemently against him; indignant like Micah of old, that he should have taken away their gods which they had made: but he had a flock among the Alpine mountains and in the Alpine Valleys, who had not forgotten the days of Vigilantius, and who both symbolized and sympathized with their admirable Prelate; themselves, in truth, being partakers both of his reproach and of his affliction.

These things says he, in an extract from his Commentary on Leviticus published by Mabillon: These things are the highest and strongest mysteries of our faith: they are the characters most deeply impressed upon our hearts. In standing up for the confirmation and defense of such truths, I am become a reproach to my neighbors insomuch that those, who see us, do not only scoff at us, but likewise, one to another, even point at us. God, however, the father of mercies and the author of all consolation, has comforted us in all our afflictions: that, in like manner, we might be able to comfort those, who are weighed down with sorrow and affliction. We rely upon the protection of him, who has armed and fortified us with the armor of righteousness and our faith; that tried shield for our eternal salvation. Here we perceive a direct reference to the twofold state of the diocese over which he painfully presided.

Some of his neighbors, it seems, were so irritated at the doctrines which he preached, that they not only scoffed, but even literally pointed the finger of scorn at him.

Yet he had to comfort others, who, in like manner with himself, were pressed down with sorrow and affliction.

The distinction is marked with singular precision: and its import, I think, can scarcely be misunderstood.

In the scoffers, we may note the Riparii and the Desiderii of the day’ those genuine successors of Jerome’s correspondents, who deemed their lowland parishes or suffragan dioceses polluted by a too great vicinity to the mountains and valleys of the Cottian Alps.

In the partakers of holy Claude’s affliction; the objects, like himself, of ribald scorn and the pointed finger of self-satisfied apostatic disdain; men, who needed the evangelical consolations which the troubles of their invaluable Bishop had so well qualified him experimentally to communicate: in these strongly-characterized members of his extensive Metropolitanship, we may note the Leonistic Vigilantii of the times; those genuine successors of the primitive Bishops and People, who were honored by Jerome’s furious vituperation; kindred souls with the apostolic Claude; theologians, whose faith and practice stand out strongly reflected by the recorded sentiments of their superintending friend and pastor and adviser and comforter.

I am unwilling to call this obvious application of Claude’s language by the name of a mere conjecture. From the Bishop’s own statement to the Abbot Theutmir, we know, that Turin and its daughter cities were, as the Apostle speaks, wholly given to idolatry. And yet, from the evidence already adduced, we likewise know, that one large portion of his diocese, the valleys and mountains of the Cottian Alps, no less vehemently detested all modifications of the odious superstition in question; firmly, with their Bishop, holding to the doctrines and practices of the Gospel and the Primitive Church.

When these two matters are combined, I really see not what other satisfactory illustration the language of Claude is capable of admitting.

V. Accordingly, the illustration is fully borne out by his hostile contemporary Dungal, from whom we distinctly learn the precise fact which we wish to learn: the fact, namely, that the diocese of Claude was divided into two parts; the one part, comprehending those who adhered to the superstition of the day and who warmly opposed him; the other part, comprehending those who symbolized with him in doctrine and who are palpably the Vallenses of the Cottian Alps.

This book, I Dungal vowed to dedicate and compose, in honor of God and the Emperor, against the mad and blasphemous dirges of Claude Bishop of Turin: not that there lacked abundant reason for reclamation and complaint long before I came into this country, while I sighed to behold the Lord’s harvest overrun with malignant weeds; but, lest I should seem only to beat the air, I long remained silent.

The people in this region are separated from each other, and are divided into two parts, concerning the observations of the Church: that is to say, concerning the images and holy picture of the Lord’s passion. Hence, with murmurs and contentions, the Catholics say: that that picture is good and useful; and that, for instruction, it is almost as profitable, as Holy Scripture itself. But the heretic, on the contrary, and the part seduced by him, say that it is not so; for it is a seduction into error, and is indeed no other than idolatry.

A similar contention prevails respecting the cross. For the Catholics say · that it is good and holy; that it is a triumphal banner; and that it is a sign of eternal salvation. But the adverse part, with their master, reply that it is not so; inasmuch as it only exhibits the opprobrium of the Lord’s passion and the derisive ignominy of his death.

In like manner, concerning the commemoration of the Saints, there is a dispute, as to the approaching them for the sake of prayer, and as to the venerating of their relics. For some affirm: that it a good and religious custom to frequent the churches of the martyrs; where their sacred ashes and holy bodies, with the honor due to their merits, are deposited; and where, through their intervention, both corporal and spiritual sicknesses are, by the divine grace and operation, healed most copiously and most presently. But others resist, maintaining’ that the saints after their death, as being ignorant of what is passing upon earth, can aid no one by their intercession; and that, to their relics, not a whit more reverence is due, than to any ordinary bones of mere animals or to any portion of mere common earth. After this specification, he proceeds, in his rambling and declamatory fashion, to answer the Epistle of Claude addressed to the Abbot Theutmir: some portions of which, specially referred to by Dungal, Papirius Masson has published and prefixed to the Work of Dungal himself. VI. Here I need only to remark: that Claude and his faithful flock the Vallenses disclaimed all charge of innovation; while, with a force of argument to which Dungal’s miserable and verbose reply affords a very curious contrast, they exposed the unscriptural vanity of image-worship and cross-worship and relic-worship and idle pilgrimages to Rome and formal penances and papal supremacy inherent in the chair of the Apostle.

All these things, says Claude, are mighty ridiculous: truly, they are matters, rather to be lamented, than to be committed to the gravity of writing. But, against foolish men, we are constrained to propound foolish things. Return to the heart which you have left, ye wretched prevaricators: ye, who love vanity and are become vain; ye, who crucify afresh the Son of God and put hint to open shame; ye, who in this manner, even by whole troops, have made the souls of miserable men the companions of demons, alienating them from their Creator through the nefarious sacrilege of images, and thus casting them down into perpetual damnation. Return, ye blind, to the true light which lighteneth every one that cometh into the world the light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not; the light, which perceiving not, ye are therefore in darkness, and walk in darkness, and know not whither you go because darkness hath blinded your eyes. VII. I must not omit to remark: that, in an evidential point of view, Dungal’s perpetual reference to Vigilantius is not a little striking and important.

He charges Claude and his Vallenses with teaching and maintaining the same doctrines, as those taught and maintained by the eminent individual in question: and his whole strain of uncomely vituperation serves only to show; that, after a lapse of four centuries, the memory and influence of the admirable Leonist still, in the Valleys of the Cottian Alps, remained fixed and unimpaired. 13 Accordingly, while he forgets not to mention the birth of Vigilantius at the Lugdunum Convenarum of the Pyrenees, he describes him, certainly with much correctness, as having been the neighbor of Claude: though it may be doubted, whether, with equal correctness, he asserts Vigilantius to have been the author of Claude’s madness. 14 The madness in question, as holy Claude well knew, existed in Scripture and in the Primitive Church, long before any of the contending parties, either in the fifth century or in the ninth century, had made their appearance upon the face of this nether world. Hence we may perfectly understand the immeasurable wrath of Dungal, that Claude, to confound idolatry, should actually have dared to quote Scripture. Here, then, we have evidence, both for the continued existence and for the resolute unchangeableness of the Vallenses at the beginning of the ninth century. For, as it appears from a specific date in the Work of Dungal, Claude must have written his epistle to Theutmir shortly before the year 820: and Dungal must have answered him, either in, or shortly after, that same year. 16 The Vallenses, therefore, must have been in their native fastnesses, bearing their appointed testimony to scriptural truth and against paganizing idolatry, at the commencement of the ninth century.

VIII. Nor can it justly be said, as some have imagined, that they owed their origin to the faithful preaching of Claude of Turin. No doubt, he greatly encouraged and strengthened them: but, as we have had direct evidence to their long prior existence, so a diligent authoritative investigation, conducted by a bitter enemy, has been found to bring out the very same result.

Shortly before the year 1630, Marco Aurelio Rorenco, Prior of St. Roch at Turin, was employed to institute a strict inquiry into the opinions and connections and antiquity of the mountaineer Vallenses: and his researches led to the production of two Works; the one, published in the year 1632; and the other published in the year 1649.

Now in the first of these Works, entitled, A narrative of the introduction of Heresies into the Valleys, he states: that The Valdenses were so ancient, as to afford no absolute certainty in regard to the precise time of their origination; but, at all events, that, In the ninth and tenth centuries, they were even then not a new sect. And, in the second of them, entitled Historical Memorials of the Introduction of Heresies, he makes some very important additions to his former statement; for he there tells us: that, In the ninth century, so far from being a new sect, they were rather to be deemed a race of fomenters and encouragers of opinions which had preceded them; further remarking, that Claude of Turin was to be reckoned among these fomenters and encouragers, inasmuch as he was a person, who denied the reverence due to the holy cross, who rejected the veneration and invocation of saints, and who was a principal destroyer of images. 18 CHAPTER - THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES SHEWN FROM THE LANGUAGE OF ATTO OF VERCELLI ABOUT a century after the time of Claude, we again find the Alpine Vallenses presented, with a sufficient measure of distinctness, to our observation.

Vercelli is a city of Piedmont, not very far distant from Turin to the eastward: and it constitutes the ecclesiastical metropolis of an immediately contiguous diocese or province. Of this district, in the year 945, Atto was Bishop or Archbishop. Hence, from the mere circumstance of locality, he must have been fully aware of what was passing, both in his own province, and in his own close vicinity.

I. Now two of his Epistles, by describing and censuring what he deemed the errors of certain neighboring religionists, who had penetrated into his diocese of Vercelli and who had there successfully labored to make proselytes, establish alike both the prolonged existence of the Vallenses and their steady adherence to the system of doctrine which had distinguished them in the time of Claude of Turin. 1. The former of these two Epistles is couched in terms following.

Atto, by the grace of God, a humble Bishop, health and joy to all the faithful who reside in our diocese.

Lately, on the eve of the Octave of the Lord, we preached, God permitting, to those who were present a certain discourse, which we judge it necessary to direct to yourselves also.

In your parts, alas, there are many persons, who despise the divine services of the Church. These apply themselves to auguries or to signs of the heavens or to vain precantations, fearing not that which the Lord says concerning the Jews. A generation, incredulous and perverse, seeketh a sign. Paul likewise, the blessed Apostle, exclaims: Beware, lest any one seduce you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ.

And elsewhere: Why turn ye again to weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? The Psalmist, moreover, says; Ye Sons of men bow long will you be heavy in heart, and love vanity, and seek after a lie?” And again: Blessed is the man, whose hope is in the name of the Lord, and who has not looked to vanities and insane falsehoods. Farewell in the Lord. 2. The latter of the two Epistles speaks the same language, and plainly refers to the same subject.

Atto, through the mercy of Christ, a humble Bishop, to all the people of our diocese of the holy mother Church of Vercelli.

Know ye, that, both through Christ himself and through the holy Apostles or Prophets and through the other holy Teachers, we have heard: that numerous false prophets will come, who, what is most grievous, will study to turn many aside from the way of truth, so as to lead them into destruction, inasmuch as they shall have given credit to their pretensions. Whence the heart is not so easily preserved in righteousness, but that ye may hasten to believe even some persons who utter only words of brute ignorance and simplicity: insomuch that (alas, most unhappy men!), being deceived by diabolical error, and forsaking your holy mother the Church or the Priests through whom ye ought to come to eternal salvation, you even distinguish those individuals by the name of Prophets.

Wherefore, when this letter shall have been seen or heard or known, if, by chance, any one of you (which God forbid!) shall hereafter perpetrate wickedness of such a description: let him learn, that be is altogether to be condemned, and that he has no license either to drink wine or to eat anything cooked save bread alone, until he shall come to his holy mother the Church of Vercelli and into our presence, in order that he may be adjudged to make satisfaction and to exhibit the true humility of penitence.

But, if any one, inflated by pride, shall attempt to act against this our behest, let him know: that he is to be driven from the threshold of the Church, an alien from the holy communion; and that he is to be abominated by all the faithful, until he shall have submitted to the correction of the Holy Church, as well himself, as all those who shall have associated with him after they have learned his character.

If, moreover, any one of the Priests (which God avert!) shall peradventure have been polluted with such an abomination · let him not dare usurpatively to administer any divine sacrament, until he shall have made satisfaction in our judgment worthy of God. II. Thus run two of the Epistles of Atto. and, in each of them, the Bishop is obviously speaking of one and the same body of individuals, whatever precise individuals may be intended.

The following are the several marked characteristics which he ascribes to them.

They lived in his own immediate neighbor-hood: they despised the divine services of the dominant Church: they uttered, what Atto deemed, words of brute ignorance and simplicity: they deceived, by diabolical error, their proselytes: they induced them to forsake their holy mother the Church: they taught them to desert the Priests, through whom they ought to come to eternal salvation: and, from the nature of their ministrations, they were distinguished, among the people, by the name of Prophets or Religious Instructors; insomuch that the Bishop supposed them to be those numerous predicted false prophets, who should come and study to turn aside many from the way of truth.

Such is Atto’s account of his troublesome neigh-bouts: and, when the several points of vicinage and numbers and interference for the purpose of proselytism are considered, it is difficult to specify what persons can have been intended by the description, save the contiguous Vallenses of the Cottian Alps. But, if their identity with the Vallenses be admitted: then we have a full attestation to the still continued existence of the Vallenses, locally and theologically unchanged, in the middle of the tenth century.

It will be said, that I have pretermited one, and that not the least extraordinary, of the characteristics which are ascribed by Atto to the individuals in question: he represents them as being sorcerers who dealt in the impious vanity of magical incantations.

To this it might be sufficient to reply: that falsehood is ever inconsistent with itself; and (agreeably to the axiom) that the very incongruity of the present charge demonstrates it to be nothing more than a malignant calumny fabricated by their inveterate and unscrupulous enemies the Romish Priesthood. Mere sorcerers, or mere pretenders to diabolical potency, would never, we may be quite sure, have troubled themselves with teaching their silly customers to despise the services of the ruling Church, or with injecting religious doubts into their minds as to the security of their immortal souls in the hands of the Romish Priesthood.

Such are not the arts or habits of reputed or stimulated wizards and witches and votaries of Satan. They clearly appertain to persons of widely different principles and character.

But I may safely advance beyond this sufficiently-obvious argument. The charge, preferred against the neighbors of Atto, was that of sorcery. Now this identical charge was actually preferred against his alpine neighbors the Vallenses. Hence, the very fact of the charge having been preferred against the neighbors of Atto, serves only to confirm and establish the position, that the Vallenses were those neighboring proselytizers who made such provoking theological inroads into the diocese of Vercelli.

Through all the middle ages, the Vallenses of Piedmont were confidently reported to be an unclean race of impious magicians.

This prevalent notion of their sorcery was often of considerable use to them in their battles with their enemies. It was devoutly believed, that, through special favor of the devil, they were proof against musketry: and it was even asserted with an oath, that their Barbes or Clergy, after an action, gathered up the balls in their shirts by handfuls, without their having received the slightest scratch. The approved mode of shooting Satan’s pupils with silver bullets was, I suppose, either then unknown, or on trial had been found to be too expensive. In a similar spirit of voracious credulity, a popish wiseacre, in the year 1488, gravely assured Duke Philip of Burgundy: that the children of the terrific Vaudois were invariably born, with hairy throats, with four rows of awfully black teeth in their heads, and (like the cyclopean brethren of old) with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads. Such sagacious individuals were indisputably of the same school as those writers, upon whose credit we have been more than once exhorted (for it were unfair to lay the whole burden of the kindly exhortation upon the single back of Bossuet) to believe all the Manichean Diaboliads ascribed to the old Paulicians and the later Albigenses. Yet, in regard to the concernments of the Vaudois with the Evil One, so firmly persuaded was each miserable dupe of the Romish Priesthood, that the very term Vaulderie came to denote Witchcraft. 5 Their faith rested upon the credible report of a shuddering Inquisitor: and who shall doubt an Inquisitor’s veracity, when he is dealing with an obstinate Heretic? But let us hear the report, that naught may be extenuated and naught set down in malice.

When they wish to go to the said Vaulderie, they anoint themselves with an ointment which the devil has given them. They then rub it with a very small rod of wood: and, with palms in their hands, they place the rod between their legs. Thus prepared and equipped, they fly away wherever they please: and the devil carries them to the place, where they ought to hold the said assembly. In that place, they find tables ready set out, charged with wine and victuals: and a devil gives them the meeting, in the shape of a he-goat, with the tail of an ape, or in some form of a man. There, to the said devil, they offer oblation and homage: — and there they commit crimes so fetid and enormous, as well against God as against nature, that the said Inquisitor declared that he did not dare to name them. The result of the investigation will readily be anticipated’ but, as to the poor victims of popish intolerance themselves, when they were brought out to be burned, they declared, that they had never had any thing to do with Vaulderie, and that they did not even know what idea was annexed to the term. Nevertheless, the districts in France, through which these reputed sorcerers were scattered, acquired so evil an odor, that merchants scarcely dared to visit them, lest they should be branded with the hateful name of Vauldois. 7 III. Among the people of Vercelli and its diocese, the great success of the Vallensic Missionaries may be readily gathered from the very lamentations of Atto: and his angry peradventure, in regard to the possibility of some even among his Clergy adopting their theological sentiments, shows not obscurely, that many of the Priesthood were already in that unsatisfactory predicament. These were, I suppose, the most exemplary, the most religiously disposed, and the best informed, of the Order: and it is highly probable, that the notorious profligacy and the gross ignorance of their brethren may have led them to seek pure faith and consistent practice among the despised and hated Vallenses.

Accordingly, on the one hand, a chapter of Atto’s own Cupitulare strictly inhibits, under pain of an anathema, all his Suffragan Bishops and Priests and Deacons and Clerks of every description, from resorting to those whom he stigmatizes under the aspect of sorcerers and magicians: while, on the other hand, he addresses two admonitory Epistles to his Clergy on the fruitful subject of their scandalous concubinage, which led them rapaciously to rob the Church in order to decorate and enrich their spurious offspring and their acknowledged harlots. The reprehensions of the Bishop are just and praiseworthy: but what must have been the state of the Priesthood to require them? Atto admits: that, through the vices of the Clerical Order, the derision of the vulgar was excited and the name of the Lord was blasphemed; for these depraved men were actually not ashamed to play the part of judicial bullies on behalf of their strumpets and bastards. 9 Yet does he complain: that the Vallenses taught his flock to doubt, whether such pastors were the surest guides to eternal salvation!

CHAPTER - THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES SHOWN FROM THE LANGUAGE OF PETER DAMIAN AS the Romish Clergy, if we may believe their Bishop Atto of Vercelli, rejoiced in concubinage and a spurious progeny: so the Clergy of the Valdenses claimed and exercised their undoubted Christian right to enter into the holy estate of matrimony.

In the days of Jerome, as we have seen, the Bishops of the Cottian Alps even went so far as to refuse ordination save to already married candidates: and, in the middle of the eleventh century, or about a hundred years later than the time of Atto and his exemplary Priesthood, we find the Valdensic Clergy, in despite both of roman anger and of increasing superstition, still maintaining their liberty, and still preserving the wise custom of their forefathers. 1. The account of them under this aspect is rendered doubly curious, by the amusing professional flattery offered upon the occasion to the Princess Adelaide; who appears, as Duchess of Savoy and as Marchioness of the Cottian Alps.

In the Epistle addressed to this great Lady by the blessed Peter Damian, Adelaide, under the hands of the courtly saint, is the Deborah of the day, while the less active Metropolitan of Turin performs the inferior part of the lagging Barak. The figurative Sisera, destined to be slain by the joint efforts of the united avengers, is Sacerdotal Matrimony: for this spiritual usurper domineers over certain of her Grace’s Clergy, with no less unrelenting tyranny than the literal Sisera ever afflicted the unhappy children of Israel. But relief is at hand. Let the Bishops in the borders of Deborah’s territories, where the enormities of Sisera are the most atrocious, with Barak at their head, come to the rescue: and, while the archiepiscopal warrior deals with the husbands; let the ducal prophetess show no mercy to the wives. Yet, forsooth, wives said I? Wives, I trow, they are not, as holy Peter acutely argues: but females of a most ancient, though non-descript, character. With Mary, God acknowledges virgins; with Anna, widows; with Susanna, wives; but who, I pray, are these? Since God owns them not, let them in-continently be turned out of the temple. Here I shall prudently stop: for the blessed writer’s happy illustration of Sisera’s enormity which immediately follows the dismissal of the unrecognized females from church, albeit addressed to the princely Adelaide, will be more honored in its suppression than in its adduction.

II. The amount of the present evidence is this.

About the year 1050, there was, on the borders or marches of the Piedmontese Dominions, a pertinaciously married Clergy: and, neither the dilatory Barak of Turin nor his Suffragan Bishops on the borders seeming to have much inclination for the task, Adelaide, as Marchioness of the Cottian Alps or as Lady-Warden of the Vallensic Boundary-District, is exhorted by Peter Damian to coerce and to punish them.

CHAPTER - THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VALLENSES SHEWN FROM THE LANGUAGE OF RODOLPH OF ST. TRUDON OUR next step must be over some seventy or eighty years: and then we shall once more hear of the same refractory people in the same mountainous region.

Rodolph, Abbot of St. Trudon, was engaged in writing his Chronicle, from the year 1108 to the year 1136. About the mean year 1124, he and some members of his Religious Fraternity were at Rome on the spiritual business of the Convent. When, at length, he purposed to return homeward, he heard — that the whole of a certain country, through which he had designed to travel, was polluted with an inveterate heresy concerning the body and blood of the Lord. This circumstance induced him to proceed by a different route: and, after encountering sundry hardships and difficulties, he and his companions at length reached Basle. From that place, Alexander, one of the monks, rode on horseback through Burgundy: but the way-worn Abbot himself, tired with his laborious journey through Switzerland, took shipping on the Rhine; and, after a perilous navigation described in words which imply shipwreck, he landed near Cologne. From this point, striking over the country, I suppose, he would reach his Monastery by a different course from that which Alexander pursued on horseback through Burgundy. Such is the narrative: and it is not difficult to collect from it the region, which is described as being polluted by an inveterate heresy concerning the body and blood of the Lord.

The equestrian journey of Alexander distinctly teaches us: that the direct line of march, to be pursued by Rodolph and his company, lay through Burgundy. Now the course from Rome to Burgundy would lie straight through Turin and along the skirts of the land of the Vallensic District.

But, to avoid the polluted country, the holy Abbot kept to the east: and thus, by a route which must have carried him near Milan and through Switzerland, he reached Basle. To understand the justice of these remarks, nothing more is necessary than the simple consultation of a map.

I. Now the remarks in question bring out two very important results: the one, negative; the other, positive.

At the time when Rodolph composed his Chronicle, there were two countries in the north of Italy, where the heresy (as he calls it) concerning the body and blood of Christ was avowed and maintained: the district of the Cottian Alps, occupied by the Vallenses; and the region of Lombardy, irregularly colonized by the Publicans or Paulicians or Cathari or (as they were afterward called in France) Albigenses. Hence, on the first perusal of the passage in the Chronicle, we might doubt, as to which of these two provinces was the polluted country intended by Rodolph.

Both the narrative, however, and the march, of the weary pilgrim, distinctly show, that he could not have meant Lombardy: for, in order to avoid the polluted country, Lombardy itself was, in truth, the precise region through which he traveled in his way to Basle.

If, then, negatively, the province of Lombardy, sprinkled with Paulicians, could not have been the land described by Rodolph as the polluted country: it can only remain, positively, that the polluted country in question, which the Abbot avoided, was the Alpine District inhabited by the Vallenses.

II. These are the conclusions, to which we are brought by the very necessity of the language employed in the Chronicle: and, with them, will exactly agree the respective conditions of the two countries, one or the other of which must be the country intended by Rodolph.

The Abbot speaks, not merely of certain individuals scattered through a country, which in no wise generally symbolized with them in doctrine’ but he speaks, of a whole country, that is to say, of the entire inhabitants of a whole country, as being polluted to the very core with the alleged heresy.

Accordingly, the large province of Lombardy, including the Milanese, could, with no propriety, be said to have been itself thus polluted’ for, as we learn from Reinerius, even a century later than the time of Rodolph, the Paulicians had no more than six Churches throughout the whole of Italy; and the amount of the associated members in Lombardy scarcely reached two thousand five hundred. But the region of the Cottian Alps was altogether tenanted by the Vallenses: so that, with the strictest accuracy, it would be described by Rodolph, as a country so utterly polluted with an inveterate heresy, that, within its recesses, which were likewise in the evil odor of sorcery and witchcraft, he cared not to trust either his person or his orthodoxy.

III. Thus, both geographically and circumstantially, both negatively and positively, we are driven from Lombardy, and are constrained to plant our feet upon the land of the Vallenses.

Hence the testimony of Rodolph will run: that, during the early part of the twelfth century, the Vallenses still continued to occupy the Valleys of the Cottian Alps; and that they still persevered in maintaining their inveterate or ancient heresy concerning the body and blood of the Lord.

CHAPTER - THE RISE OF THE FRENCH VALDENSES IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY IT cannot but have struck the cautious inquirer, that every notice respecting the Vallenses of Piedmont, down to the present point, relates exclusively to the Vallenses in their own Country or at most to the Vallenses occasionally penetrating into their own immediate Italian Neighborhood.

The circumstance is remarkable’ but, so far as I am aware, no allusion to the Vallenses out of their own Country or to the Vallenses out of their own immediate Neighborhood occurs, until we reach the days of Peter the rich Vallensic Merchant of Lyons. Then, for the first time, through the institution of that peculiar Class of the Leonists which was denominated The Fraternity of the Poor Men of Lyons, the Vallenses, who had hitherto testified against apostolic corruption only in or near their own Alpine Valleys, became missionaries upon a large scale and to a wonderfully great extent. I. Such being the case, there has hitherto been a marked and somewhat curious difference of character between the Albigenses and the Vallenses.

Though, in doctrine, they mainly symbolized; whence, ultimately, without any mutual repulsion and without any serious difficulty, they coalesced together into one undistinguishable race of antipontificial religionists: yet, while the Vallenses long remained obscurely quiescent in the deep recesses of their native Valleys, the Albigenses were the very Pelasgi of evangelical reform. After these extraordinary individuals had emigrated, under the name of Paulicians, from Asia into Europe, we find them speedily branching out from one end to the other of that latter continent. Their ecclesiastical establishments, for Reinerius is unwilling to decorate those establishments with the name of Churches, sixteen in number, reached, in the twelfth and at the beginning of the thirteenth century, all the way, from Thrace and Bulgaria, to Gascony and the Pyrenees 3 : their theological schools, thronged with students, were so numerous, that Reinerius estimates forty and one in the diocese of Padua alone, attempting not to count those of Germany and Provence 4 : and, of themselves, we hear, at Orleans, at Arras, at Treves, and even (though their first effort to obtain a settlement there was unsuccessful) in England.

But, until the days of Peter Valdo, the mountaineers of the Cottian Alps seem never to have moved from their secluded Valleys, save peradventure to mingle, in domestic efforts at proselytism, with the lowlanders of Turin or Vercelli. Hence their name occurs not in France, nor (I believe) in any country beyond their own, until after the commencement of Peter’s ministry about the year 1160. As far as hitherto has been discovered, it first, in French or rather in English story, appears in the year 1179: for Walter Mapes, the facetious Precentor of Lincoln and Archdeacon of Oxford, mentions, that, in that year, he conversed at Rome with certain Valdesians, so called from their Primate Valdes of Lyons; who, Frenchmen themselves in point of origin, and having recently been proselyted by that eminent Valdensian, wished, in the simplicity of their heart and the honesty of their purpose, to obtain, from Pope Alexander III, a license to act as missionary preachers of the Gospel. A new impulse, however, was now to be given to the exertions of the primitive Vallenses (those oldest of all heretics, in the judgment of the Inquisitor Reinerius) to promote the cause of pure and undefiled religion: and, through God’s providence, the honored instrument was the individual noticed by Mapes, Peter the rich merchant of Lyons; himself denominated Valdes from the country and people whence his family originated and where he had lived prior to his settlement, and himself communicating to his French converts the name which he had received from his own piedmontese descent and connection.

II. At present, in tracing downward, from the apostolic age, the Vallenses of Piedmont, I am concerned only with the ultimate Italian origin of the Valdenses of France: for let us not, in defiance of all evidence, imagine with the interested Bossuet, that the Valdenses or Vallenses or Leonists, in point of their final theological pedigree, sprang only from Peter of Lyons in the twelfth century. The native French Valdenses, no doubt, might justly acknowledge him as their local founder; and, under this aspect, Reinerius classes the Poor Men of Lyons (who were also, no less than a much more ancient sect, denominated Leonists) as a race of modern heretics: but, a Vaudois himself, he was nothing more than the planter of a new shoot, the parent stock of which is to be sought in the Cottian Alps of northern Italy.

On this point, the point, I mean, of the Italian theological origin of the Valdenses of France, Conrad of Lichtenau, Abbot of Ursperg at the commencement of the thirteenth century, is as full and decisive, as can reasonably be desired.

In the year 1212, he tells us, two new Religious Orders, that of the Minor Friars and that of the Preaching Friars, were instituted: and the object of their institution was, to meet two sects, which, having long since sprung up in Italy, still, when the Abbot wrote, continued to exist. These two sects, or rather these two branches of one and the same sect, were known by the names of The Humiliated and The Poor Men of Lyons: the former, I suppose, being the more stationary and domestic Vallenses of Piedmont; while the latter, professedly and decidedly a Body of Missionaries bent upon carrying the primitive doctrine of the Alpine Valleys to the very ends of the earth, were evidently no other than the French proselytes of Peter the Valdo, though described as being, through him their Vallensic Founder, of Italian origination. With the French Valdenses, however, we are not at present quite immediately concerned. Our object just now is simply to connect the disciples of Peter the Valdo with the Italian Valdenses; that is to say, the modern Leonists (as Reinerius speaks) with the ancient Leonists: and the testimony of the Abbot of Ursperg fully accomplishes that object.

For the matter stands thus.

That the Poor Men of Lyons were the proselytes and disciples of Peter the Valdo, we all know.

Yet Conrad of Lichtenau, we see, distinctly tells us: that these Poor Men or Leonists or Valdenses, when viewed as a sect and when considered in reference to their ultimate theological origin, had already sprung up and had long existed in Italy, previous to their becoming celebrated in France under the auspices and tutelage of the piedmontese merchant Peter.

III. Thus, I am willing to hope, the Vallenses, in their present settlements through the valleys of the Cottian Alps, have been clearly traced, from the very times of the Primitive Church, down to an age when their existence can no longer be doubtful.

CHAPTER - THE THEOLOGY OF THE VALLENSES DURING THE PERIOD OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY I NOW turn to the vitally important point of the Theology of the Vallenses.

In order, then, that we may have a full and distinct view of their Doctrinal System, it will be proper to exhibit it, as maintained at three several periods: the period of the twelfth century; the period of the thirteenth century; and the period either at or immediately after the Reformation.

For, if we ascertain the Doctrinal System of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and if we find it the same as the Doctrinal System at the time of the Reformation, we may fairly infer the agreement of all the intermediate centuries.

Respecting the yet earlier period which preceded all the three periods thus marked out; a period, which may be viewed, as taking in the times of Jerome on the one hand and the times of Rodolph of St. Trudon on the other hand; a period, therefore, extending from the commencement of the fifth century down to the earlier part of the twelfth century: respecting this earlier period, nothing more needs here to be said; because every requisite statement has, in truth, been anticipated. During this lengthened term, there can be no reasonable doubt, that the opinions of Vigilantius and the opinions of Claude, as they stood at the beginning of the fifth century and at the beginning of the ninth century, were, universally and invariably, the doctrinal opinions of the Alpine Vallenses.

Such matters having thus been already dispatched, I proceed to inquire into the Doctrinal System of the Vallenses during the evolution of the period comprehended within the twelfth century.

To the very beginning of this age, or rather indeed to the last year of the preceding age, certainly one of the Valdensic Documents, which have come down to us, is to be referred: and, that another of them belongs to the latter half of the same twelfth age, there is at least very strong internal evidence.

Before this testimony is adduced, it may be necessary to make some preparatory observations.

In the year 1658, Sir Samuel Morland brought, from Piedmont to England, several manuscripts, which purported to be Works of the ancient Vaudois of the Cottian Alps. These he deposited in the University Library at Cambridge: whence, through whatever agency, most of them have since disappeared.

Among them may be specially noticed: A Confession of Faith; A Catechism; A Treatise upon Antichrist; and A Poem denominated the Noble Lesson.

Of these four Compositions, two only are given in the Work of Perrin, published in the year 1618: the Catechism, to wit; and the Treatise on Antichrist. With respect to the Confession of Faith, it strikes me, from its scholastic regularity and from its being systematically drawn up in fourteen several Articles, as affording decisive internal evidence, that it must have been composed subsequently to the Reformation. It was packed, with sundry other Documents of less moment, in one parcel; to the envelope of which the collector had affixed the general date of the year 1120: a circumstance, which itself shows, that all at least of the Documents, unless the doctrine of chances be a fable, could not have belonged to that precise year. I do not suppose, indeed, that there was any intentional imposition on the part of him who affixed the date’ but the action must, I think, be viewed, as purely arbitrary, and as altogether unauthoritative. On the Catechism, I do not venture to give an absolutely positive opinion’ but, as it is more refined and more speculative than the Catechism of the Church of England, I doubt its being the production of a simple people at a remote age; and, therefore, I shall not cite it in evidence to the doctrines of the Vallenses in the twelfth century. From certain internal marks, the Treatise on Antichrist, provided we keep strictly to the Treatise itself and dismiss its palpably spurious adjuncts, may be viewed as probably genuine. 4 Of the authenticity of the Noble Lesson, the beautifully simple production of a confessedly simple people, there can, I think with the learned Raynouard, be no reasonable doubt entertained. Taking such a view of the four documents, I have no concern save with the two last’ that is to say, the Treatise on Antichrist and the Noble Lesson.

I. The Treatise on Antichrist was tied up in the same parcel with the Confession: and, as I have just observed, the whole packet was labeled with the date of the year 1120. 1. Now such a mode of affixing a single specific date to a whole parcel of severally undated papers is plainly incapable of giving the least authority to the date itself. Had the collector of the documents, after a careful examination, affixed to the parcel the general, though indefinite, date of the twelfth century: some attention might have been paid to it. But the single and definite date of the year 1120, affixed conjointly to a mass of many papers, cannot in itself be viewed as carrying any weight or authoritativeness. Hence, if the Treatise on Antichrist be admitted as a really ancient composition, the admission, since it contains no date within itself, can only be made on the internal testimony, which the texture of the Work may be found to afford.

Adopting this mode of trial, then, we must immediately strike off the supplementary articles: I mean those, which treat of Purgatory and the Invocation of the Saints and the Sacraments. In these supplementary articles, a reference is made to what is known to have been a compilation of the thirteenth century, under the name of the Milleloquium of St. Austin.

Therefore, as Bossuet justly remarks, let them have been written when they may, assuredly they cannot have been written in the twelfth century. 2. The appendages having thus been struck off, the Treatise itself, specially on Antichrist, now remains alone: and, since it contains no date within itself, if it can safely be ascribed to any particular age, the only ground of such ascription must be the internal evidence afforded by the peculiarities of its own texture and the nature of its own allusions.

Now that internal evidence brings out at least a very strong presumption, that the Treatise was written in the course of the twelfth age: and, from its leading dogma that the Roman Church is the Apocalyptic Harlot, I much incline to deem it the production of Peter the Valdo, and thence to place it shortly after the year 1160 which witnessed the spiritual conversion of that eminent reformer. Let us proceed, then, to examine the internal evidence presented to us.

In a manner, perfectly unobtrusive and thence bearing no resemblance to the intentional management of a subsequent fabricator, the Treatise describes Antichrist, as having then attained to the full age of a perfect man: while yet it speaks, both of the mystical Babylon being divided, and likewise of many well-disposed persons devoting themselves to the preaching of the Gospel, through which, it is hoped, that the Lord will consume that Wicked One with the spirit of his mouth, notwithstanding the persecution which bad been set on foot against the members of Christ. These are the chronological marks, which occur quite incidentally in three several disconnected places of the Work: and perhaps it will not be easy to discover any period, to which they may all be referred, save the latter part of the twelfth century.

The notorious Pope Gregory VII well known by the name of Hildebrand, who had aimed at universal empire both in Church and in State, and who had raised the Papacy to a degree of power as yet unheard of, sat in the pontifical chair from the year 1073 to the year 1086.

Yet, though, in his person, Antichrist (as the Vallenses deemed the Pope) might well be said to have attained the full age of a perfect man: Rome, in the eleventh century, was so divided against itself, that, between the year 1010 and the year 1086, there were no fewer than five papal schisms; while the latter end of that century, and all the earlier part of the twelfth century down to the years 1122 and 1138, were distinguished by the violent quarrels of Popes and Antipopes, of the Church and the Empire.

Still those schisms and quarrels prevented not the characteristic popish business of zealous persecution. Martyrs were burned at Orleans, in the year 1017; were hanged in Germany, in the year 1052; and were executed at Treves, shortly after the year 1101: while, in the year 1126, after a laborious ministration of near twenty years, Peter de Bruis was brought to the stake at St. Giles in Languedoc; and, in the year 1147, his pupil and successor Henry, either perished in confinement, or (as some say), by the solicitation of Bernard and through the cruelty of the Papal Legate Alberic, was burned alive at Toulouse.

During all this time, the preaching of the Gospel by well-disposed persons as the Treatise expresses it, was going on: and, in the year 1160, by the spiritual conversion of Peter the Valdo and by his institution of those active missionaries the Poor Men of Lyons, a fresh impulse was given to that work, through which it was hoped that the Lord would speedily consume the Man of Sin by the breath of his mouth.

Such are the facts, respecting which a writer in the latter half of the twelfth century might truly say, that they had either already occurred or were still in a course of actual occurrence.

If, then, I be correct in referring the incidental allusions in the Treatise to this remarkable combination of circumstances, the result from the internal evidence will be: that the Treatise itself was written shortly after the year 1160, and that its probable author was no other than that devout merchant, whom Reinerius disparagingly owns to have been in some small measure learned, and whose zeal in communicating the New Testament in the vulgar tongue would be very likely to produce such a Work as the Treatise upon Antichrist. On this supposition, it will be easy to account for the appearance of the Work among the Vallenses of Piedmont. Either the intercourse of Peter the Valdo with his compatriots of Italy would readily and quickly secure its reception among them’ or the emigration of persecuted believers, whether Albigenses or Vallenses or a mixture of both, from France into the Valleys of the Alps, which occurred in the year 1165, may very possibly have first introduced it into the latter country. 11 At all events, there is small difficulty in conceiving the rapid transmission of a Treatise by Peter the Valdo into the border region of France and Italy. 3. Each person will judge of this internal evidence, as he pleases — but, having fairly stated it, I now feel myself at liberty to produce some extracts from the Work, as exhibiting the religious sentiments of the Vallenses during the twelfth century. Of course, agreeably to its title, the Treatise, with a reference to the Church of Rome, specially discusses the character of Antichrist: but such a discussion cannot be conducted, without propounding the theological system which was maintained in avowed opposition to Popery.

Antichrist is the falsehood of eternal damnation, covered with the appearance of the truth and righteousness of Christ and his Spouse. — The iniquity of such a system is with all his ministers, great and small: and, inasmuch as they follow the law of an evil and blinded heart, such a Congregation, taken together, is called ANTICHRIST or BABYLON, or THE FOURTH BEAST, or THE HARLOT, or THE MAN OF SIN WHO IS THE SON OF PERDITION.

His first work is: that, the service of Latria, properly due to God alone, he perverts unto Antichrist himself and to his doings; to the poor creature, rational or irrational, sensible or insensible; to man, for instance, male or female saints departed this life; and to their images, or carcasses, or relics. His doings are the sacraments, especially that of the Eucharist, which he worships equally with God and Christ, prohibiting the adoration of God alone. His second work is: that he robs and deprives Christ of the merits of Christ, with the whole sufficiency of grace and justification and regeneration and remission of sins and sanctification and confirmation and spiritual nourishment; and imputes and attributes them, to his own authority, or to a form of words, or to his own performances, or to the saints and their intercession, or to the afire of Purgatory. Titus does he divide the people from Christ, and lead them away to the things already mentioned: that so they may not seek the things of Christ nor through Christ, but only the works of their own hands; and not through a living faith in God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, but through the will and the works of Antichrist, agreeably to his preaching that man’s salvation depends upon his own deeds.

His third work is: that he attributes the regeneration of the Holy Spirit to a dead outward faith; baptizing children in that faith; and teaching, that, by the mere work of the outward consecration of baptism, regeneration may be procured.

His fourth work is: that he rests the whole religion of the people upon his Mass; for, leading them to hear it, he deprives them of spiritual and sacramental manducation.

His fifth work is: that he does everything, to be seen, and to glut his insatiable avarice.

His sixth work is: that he allows of manifest sins, without ecclesiastical censure.

His seventh work is: that he defends his unity not by the Holy Spirit, but by the secular power.

His eighth work is: that he hates, and persecutes, and searches after, and robs, and destroys, the members of Christ. — These things and many others are the cloak and vestment of Antichrist, by which he covers his lying wickedness, lest he should be rejected as a pagan. — But there is no other cause of idolatry, than a false opinion of grace and truth and authority and invocation and intercession, which this Antichrist has taken away from God, and which he has ascribed to ceremonies and authorities and a man’s own works and saints and purgatory.- As for Antichrist himself, he has already, by God’s permission, long reigned in the Church. II. I now pass on to an examination of the Noble Lesson. 1. An ancient manuscript of this Work was one of the Vallensic Documents, which Morland deposited in the Library of the University of Cambridge, and which, as I have already stated, has, since his time, disappeared. Happily, however, another ancient manuscript of the same Work is preserved in the Library of the University of Geneva: and, as a transcript, moreover, of the Cambridge manuscript had fortunately been made by Morland, the loss of that manuscript is, after all, chiefly to be regretted in the way of antiquarian curiosity. For all effective purposes, we are still, virtually, in full possession of that important Document.

Respecting the Noble Lesson itself, Mr. Raynouard, an indisputably competent judge, as he is styled by an able modern writer Mr. Hallam, has pronounced, purely on the strength of its dialect, that it must be a production of the period to which its own text refers; adding, after a strict examination, that the Genevan Manuscript has not been interpolated, though he thinks that the now lost Cambridge Manuscript had been made from a copy more ancient than the Genevan: and, in full accordance with him, Mr. Hallam observes, that Any doubts, as to the authenticity of the poem, are totally unreasonable. 2. The Noble Lesson is remarkably distinguished by bearing a date, not attached to it conjecturally by another hand, but interwoven into the very texture of the verse by the author himself.

Well have a thousand and a hundred years been completed entirely, since it was written, Now we are in the Last Time. In this passage, the precise term of eleven complete centuries is specified’ but the phraseology is such, that a doubt may be raised, whether those eleven centuries ought to be reckoned from the day when the words Now we are in the Last Time were written by one or more of the inspired penmen, or whether they ought to be reckoned from the more familiar era of Christ’s Nativity.

If we suppose, that they ought to be reckoned from the day when the words in question were written — then the date, thus brought out, will be either A.D. 1149 or A.D. 1164 or A.D. 1170 or A.D. 1180, according as the author of the poem is thought to allude to the language of St. Peter or the language of St. John, and according as the chronological arrangement of the respective first Epistles of those two Apostles by Michaelis or by Lardner is adopted. But, if we suppose, that they ought to be reckoned from the more familiar era of Christ’s Navitity: then the date, thus brought out, will, of course, be A.D. 1100.

The strict letter of the passage would require the admission of the first supposition: but the mode, in which the eleven centuries are specified, would rather seem to demand the admission of the second.

Against the first supposition may be urged the improbability, that the author of the poem should have reckoned a precise term of exactly a thousand and a hundred years completed entirely (for so runs his own description of the term) from a point of time, respecting the definite chronological settlement of which he must, like even the much more critical moderns, have been altogether ignorant: for, in such a case, a known period of accurately defined length is reckoned, what looks very like a physical impossibility, from an unknown point of time; while, somewhat strangely, a date is framed, upon the unusual and indeed unprecedented era of the composition of an Epistle or Epistles, rather than upon the usual and perfectly familiar era of Christ’s nativity. Against the second supposition may be urged the fact, that, however extraordinary and uncommon such language may be, the author himself declares his entirely completed eleven centuries to have been reckoned from the day, whatever that day was, when it was written Now we are in the Last Time. 3. Under these conflicting circumstances, our only resort can be to internal evidence, and this evidence, I think, requires the admission, that the complete eleven centuries were, in truth, reckoned by the author from the common era of Christ’s Nativity, and consequently that the real date of the poem is A.D. 1100. (1.) In the Noble Lesson, the remarkable peculiarity of the date is — that it stands forth, not so much under the aspect of a formal and merely business-like date alone, as under the aspect of a solemn warning connected immediately with what we know to have been the general impression of Christendom throughout the whole of the eleventh century.

From a chronological misinterpretation of the thousand years, mentioned in the Apocalypse as the period during which Satan should be bound; a misinterpretation, as old as the time of the commentator Arethas, and prevalent down even to the days of Usher who adopts it and of Bossuet who inclines to it: from this chronological misinterpretation, it was, in the year 1000 and for more than a century afterward, universally expected, that the world was drawing near to its termination. For St. John’s thousand years were reckoned from the Christian era. Whence the result was; that Satan, having been bound during that millennium, was loosed in the year 1000: while, from that result, by the persons who lived through the eleventh century, it was additionally concluded; that, after Satan should have prevailed over the saints, during his short permitted period of freedom, through his special minister Antichrist, the worm would be destroyed. To this opinion, the context of the passage, together with another parallel passage toward the close of the poem, evidently relates: and, since the old Valdenses were not singular in pronouncing the Papacy to be the predicted Antichrist and the Babylonian Harlot, and since the author of the Noble Lesson perceived that a thousand years with an additional hundred years (as he remarkably expresses himself in the form of a double numeration) had fully elapsed or had then been entirely completed; he, very naturally, both mentions the thousand years with their then centenary addition, and, from the signs which he beheld, anticipates the speedy arrival of the end of the world and the approaching inauguration of the day of judgment.

Such, I think, is the true key to the rationale of his singularly expressed date. The specification of the apocalyptic thousand years, with an entirely completed century appended to them, was introduced by him, not so much for a formal date of his composition, as for a solemn practical warning to his brethren. It is, I apprehend, as if he had spoken in manner following.

The earlier times of Patriarchism and Legalism having passed away, we are now living in that last time of Christianity which was written of the Apostles Peter and John. But, as you all perceive the thousand years of the apocalyptic binding of Satan, have elapsed: and, after them, another century likewise has now been entirely completed. Satan, therefore, hath assuredly been loosed: and in strict correspondence with that event, Antichrist, the predicted murderer of the Saints, hath already appeared in his true character, seated monarchally in the seven-hilled city. But we have, by the voice of prophecy, been well fore-warned WHEN Antichrist shall come: namely, at the time when Satan, at the end of the thousand years, shall be loosed. 19 Therefore, as we now behold him enthroned in the mystic Babylon, we thence also see, that the world is near to its end. 20 Consequently, we ought to covet little: for the time is short; and but little now remains. 21 This train of thought relative to the thousand years which commenced by anticipation in the tenth century, and which pervaded the whole of the eleventh century, I believe to have been greatly instrumental in leading both the Valdenses and the Albigenses so constantly to deem the Pope and his Clergy Antichrist; while, in the Roman Church, they beheld the Babylonian Harlot of the Apocalypse. No less than the Papists, they supposed, that Satan was loosed and that Antichrist was revealed when a thousand years, reckoned from the Christian era, had expired. But, with whatever reason, each party discovered the expected Antichrist, or at least the forerunner of the expected Antichrist, in the other party. With the Romanists, the rapid pullulation and increasing energy of the hated seceders, in the eleventh and afterward in the twelfth century, was a sure proof that Satan was loosed and that Antichrist was at hand. With their opponents, the monstrous portent, of a persecuting Priesthood whose labors commenced at Orleans almost immediately after the expiration of the fated thousand years, and of an apostate Church seated precisely upon the seven roman hills of prophecy, was a no less sure indication, that Antichrist and the Harlot had appeared. To the prevalence of such opinions, the Noble Lesson plainly refers: and thus, from internal evidence, establishes the supposition, that the entirely completed thousand years with the appended century are to be reckoned from the era of the Nativity; which will give, as the really intended date of the poem, the year 1100. 2. I may notice another matter; which, still on the principle of internal evidence, refers the Work to the same early period.

Then sprang up a people newly converted: Christians they were named, for they believed in Christ. But we, find here what the Scripture says: that the Jews andSARACENS persecuted them grievously. During the eleventh century, the renovated Visigoths were fiercely struggling with the Saracens in Spain; and, in the year 1099, Jerusalem was taken by Godfrey of Bouillon and his confederated crusaders. Thus thrown into active hostility with determined enemies of the Christian name, the illiterate nations of the West knew of no other Gentiles, who might be combined with the Jews in enmity to Christ and the primitive Christians, than the Paynim Saracens: or, if some were better informed, they no more scrupled to adopt the current phraseology of the day, than we scruple to designate, either the islands of the American Archipelago by the catachrestical name of the West Indies, or the aboriginals of the New World by the similarly abusive name of Indians. Chronology and propriety were, indeed, alike set at defiance by such a nomenclature: for, during the middle ages and in the times of the crusades, those decided monotheists the Saracens were resolutely set down, by the nations of the West, as a race of idolaters, who were said to worship two false deities entitled Mahound and Termagant and who were viewed as largely dealing in the unhallowed arts of pagan sorcery. 24 But, in applying the name of Saracens to the Gentiles who concurrently with the Jews persecuted the Primitive Church, the writer of the Noble Lesson used only the familiar language of the eleventh and twelfth centuries: and the oriental exploits of Godfrey, at the latter end of the eleventh age, and in the very country where these imaginary Saracens had grievously afflicted Christ and the early Christians, would naturally and readily suggest such phraseology to an author who wrote in the year 1100. (3.) On the whole, it may be generally remarked: that the entire poem itself, from beginning to end, affords, through the medium of its extreme simplicity, one continued mass of internal evidence to its remote antiquity; so that it is well nigh impossible to read it, without a growing conviction at every step, that it is the production of a distant age and of a simple people. 4. To exhibit the force of this observation, and at the same time yet additionally to show the nature of the Vallensic Theology in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, I shall subjoin some extracts from that venerable monument of secluded piety, the Noble Lesson, which, unless I be altogether mistaken, its own date teaches us to ascribe to the year 1100.

O brethren, hear a Noble Lesson.

We ought always to watch and pray: for we see, that the worm is near to its end. We ought to strive to do good works: since we see, that the world approaches to its termination.

Well have a thousand and a hundred years been entirely completed, since it was written that we are in the last times.

We ought to covet little: for we are at what remains. Daily we see the signs coming to their accomplishment, in the increase of evil and in the decrease of good. These are the perils, which the Scripture speaks of, which the Gospels have recounted, and which St. Paul mentions: that no man, who lives, can know the end.

Therefore ought we the more to fear: since we are not certain, whether death will overtake us today or tomorrow. But, when the day of judgment shall come, every one shall receive his entire payment: both those who have done ill, and those who have done well. For the Scripture saith, and we ought to believe it: that all men shall pass two ways; the good, to glory; the wicked, to torment. But, if any one shall not believe this dipartition: let him attend to Scripture from the end to the commencement. 27 Since Adam was formed down even to the present time, there may he find, if he will give his attention to it, that few are the saved in comparison with those that remain.

Wherefore, whosoever wishes to do good works, he ought to begin with paying honor to God. He ought likewise to call upon his glorious Son, the dear Son of Holy Mary; as also upon the Holy Ghost, who gives unto us a good way. These three, the Holy Trinity, being one God, ought to be invocated: full of all power, and all wisdom, and all goodness.

This we ought often to pray for and request: that he would give us fortitude to encounter the enemies; and that we man conquer them before our end, to wit, the world, the devil, and the flesh; and that be would give us wisdom accompanied with goodness, so that we may know the way of truth, and keep pure the soul which God has given us, both the soul and the body in the way of charity.

As we love the Holy Trinity, so likewise ought we to love our neighbor; for God hath commanded it: not only those who do good to us, but likewise those who do us evil. We ought, moreover, to have a firm hope in the Celestial King, that, at the end, he will lodge us in his glorious hostelry.

Now he, who shall not do what is contained in this Lesson, shall not enter into the holy house: though the saying be hard to be received by the caitiff race; who love gold and silver, who depreciate the promises of God, who keep neither his laws nor his commandments, and who suffer not good people to keep them, but rather binder them according to their power.

How did this evil enter among mankind? Because Adam sinned from the beginning, by eating of the forbidden apple; and, to others, germinated the grain of the evil seed. He gained death to himself and to others who followed him. Well may we say, that this was an evil morsel. But Christ hath redeemed the good by his passion.

Now we find, in this Lesson, that Adam misbelieved God his Creator. And we may see likewise, that those now become still worse, who abandon God the Father Almighty, and who believe in idols to their own destruction.

The author then, for the information of his simple-minded and primitive scholars, proceeds to give a brief summary of the history of the Old Testament; until, following the stream of chronology, he reaches the times of the Gospel Dispensation.

Then God sent the angel to a noble virgin of the lineage of the King, sweetly saluting her, for she was separated unto the law.

Afterward, he went on to say unto her: Fear, not, Mary; for the Holy Ghost shall be in thy companionship, and thou shalt bear a son whom thou shalt call Jesus: he shall deliver his people from that wherein they have offended. Nine months the glorious Virgin bare him in her womb: but, that she might not be reprehended, she was espoused to Joseph. Pure was our lady, and Joseph also. But this we ought to believe, for the Gospel hath said it, that they put the child in the manger when he was born, and enveloped him in rags, and poorly lodged him. Here may repent the covetous and the avaricious, who will never cease to amass riches.

Many miracles were done, when the Lord was born: for God sent the angel to announce it to the shepherds: and, in the east, appeared a star to the three men; glory also was given unto God in heaven, and on earth peace unto the good.

Afterward, the little one suffered persecution: but the child grew in grace and in age and in divine wisdom wherein he was instructed.

He called the twelve apostles; rightly are they so named: and he would change the law which he had before given. 28 Yet he changed it not, that it might be abandoned: but he renewed it, that it might be better kept. He received baptism to give salvation: and he said unto the Apostles, that they should baptize the nations; for they began the renovation. The ancient law well forbad fornication and adultery: but the new law forbids to look and to lust. The ancient law annulled matrimony, and permitted that a bill of divorce should be given: but the new law forbids to take her that is put away, and says that they should not be parted whom God hath joined. The ancient law cursed the womb which bears not fruit: the new law counsels to keep virginity. The ancient law forbad only perjury: the new law says, Swear not at all, and let thy speech be only yea and nay. The old law commanded to fight against enemies, and to render evil for evil: but the new law says, Avenge not thyself, but leave vengeance to the heavenly king, and let those live in peace who do unto thee injury, and thou shalt find pardon from the heavenly king. The old law said, Thou shalt love thy friends, and thou shalt hate thine enemies: but the new law says, Thou shalt do so no more, but love your enemies, and do good to them that injure you, and pray for them that persecute you and for them that seek an occasion against you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. The old law commanded to punish malefactors: but the new law sags, Pardon all mankind, and thou shalt find pardon from the Father Almighty; for if thou pardonest not, thou shalt not find salvation. None ought to kill or to hate any person: not ought we to scoff at the simple and the poor, nor to hold as vile the stranger who comes from another country; for, in this world, we are all pilgrims. Thus ought all we, who are brethren, to serve God. This is the new law, which Jesus Christ has said that we ought to keep.

He then gives an account of the crucifixion and of the first preaching of the Apostles: and, from the persecution, of the primitive Christians, naturally adverts to those which their genuine successors the Vallenses were themselves then suffering from the pretended disciples of the Lord.

Occurring in and before the year 1100, when as yet the Vallenses had not become missionaries in foreign regions, they relate, I suppose, to some of those local or domestic vexations and insults and harryings, which, through every age down to the present, they have experienced from the wretched bigotry of their government and their neighbors.

The Apostles were so strong in the fear of the Lord, as also both the men and the women that were with them, that for these things they ceased not either their doings or their sayings: for many of them were determined to have Jesus Christ. Great were the torments according to what is written, only because they showed the way of Jesus Christ. But, as for those who persecuted them, it was not so much for them to hold to the bad; because they had not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ: like those, who now take occasion and who persecute so much; who ought to be Christians, but whose semblance is evil. Yet in this they ought to bc reprehended, because they persecute and imprison the good: for in no lesson is it found, that the saints persecuted or imprisoned any one. Now, after the Apostles, were certain teachers: they showed the way of Jesus Christ our Savior. And these are found, even to the present time: but they are manifest to only few people. These greatly wish to show the way of Jesus Christ: but they are so persecuted, that they can do only little. So much are false Christians blinded with error; and, more than all the others, those who are their pastors. For they persecute and hate those, who are better than themselves: and they let those live quietly, who are false deceivers. But by this we may know, that they are not good pastors: because they love not the flock, save for their fleece. Yet the Scripture says, and we may see it: that, if a person loves those who are good, he will wish to love God and to fear Jesus Christ; and that he will neither curse, nor swear, nor lye, nor commit adultery, nor kill, nor defraud his neighbor, nor revenge himself upon his enemies. Nevertheless they say, that such a person is a VAUDES and is worthy of punishment: and they find occasion, through lies and deceit, to take from him that which he has gotten by his just labor. 29 But he, who is thus persecuted, strengthens himself greatly through the fear of the Lord: for the kingdom of heaven shall be given to him at the end of the world. Then shall he have great glory in the place of such dishonor. But, in this, is greatly manifested their malice: that those, who will curse and lye and swear and put out money to usury and kill and commit adultery and revenge themselves upon those who do evil to them, are said and reckoned to be good and loyal men. Yet let such a person take heed, that he be not deceived at the end, when his mortal malady comes, when death seizes upon him, and when he is scarcely able to speak. Then he calls for the priest, and wishes to confess himself: but, according to the Scripture, he has delayed too long; for it commands and says, that thou shouldest confess while in sound health, and not wait to the last. The priest demands, if he has any sin. Two or three words he answers: and he has soon finished. The priest tells him, that he cannot be forgiven, if he does not restore all that he has taken from another and well examine his sins. When he hears this he has great trouble: and he thinks within himself; If he shall restore it entirely, what will remain to his children, and what will the world say? Then he commands his children to examine their faults: and gives money to the priest, that he himself may receive absolution. Though he has extorted from another a hundred pounds or perhaps two. yet the priest will pardon him for a hundred pence, and sometimes for less when he can get no more. And he tells him a long story, and promises him pardon for he will say Mass, both for him and for his forefathers.

Thus grants he pardon to them, whether they be just or felonious: and he puts his hand upon their heads. But, when be leaves them, he occasions a grand festival: for he makes them to understand, that they have been very well absolved. Yet ill are they confessed, who are thus faulty; and they will certainly be deceived by such an absolution: and he, that makes them believe it, sins mortally. For I dare to say, and it will be found very true: that all the Popes from Sylvester down to the present one, and all the Cardinals, and all the Bishops, and all the Abbots, even all such put together, have no power to absolve or to pardon a single creature in regard to a single mortal sin; inasmuch as God alone pardons, and no other can do it. But those, who are pastors, ought to do this. They ought to preach to the people, and pray with them, and often feed them with divine doctrine, and chastise sinners giving unto them discipline. That is to say: they ought to admonish them to repentance; so that they should confess their sins without fail, that they should repent in this present life, that they should fast and give alms and pray fervently; for, by these things, the soul finds salvation.

Wherefore, we Christians, unworthy of the name of Christians, who have sinned, and who have abandoned the law of Jesus Christ (for we have neither fear nor faith nor charity), ought to confess our sins without delay: amending ourselves, with weeping and penitence, in respect to the offences which have been done through three mortal sins; namely, the last of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, through which we have done ill. This way we must keep. If we will love and follow Jesus Christ, we must have spiritual poverty of heart, and love chastity, and serve God humbly: so may we follow the way of Jesus Christ; and so may we overcome our enemies.

The author then enumerates and describes the three laws, which have been given from God to man: the unwritten patriarchal law; the written law of Moses; and the also written law of Christ. This being done, he brings his poem to its conclusion.

We have only to imitate Jesus Christ, and to do his pleasure, and to keep firmly that which he has commanded, and to be well advised when Antichrist shall come, that we may give no credence either to his doings or to his sayings. But, according to Scripture, there are many Antichrists: for all, who are contrary to Christ, are Antichrist.

Many signs and great wonders shall be, from this time forward, to the day of judgment. The heaven and the earth shall burn: and all the living shall die. 32 Then all shall rise again to life everlasting.

Every building shall be laid prostrate: and then shall be the last judgment, when God shall separate his people according as it is written. Then shall he say to the wicked: Depart from me, ye accursed, into the infernal fire which shall have no end. There shall they be straitened by three grievous conditions: namely, by multitude of pains; and by sharp torment; and by an irreversible damnation.

From this may God deliver us, if it be his pleasure: and may he give us to hear that which he will say to his people without delay, when he shall say; Come unto me, ye blessed of my Father, and possess the kingdom which is prepared for you from the beginning of the world. In that place, you shall have delight and riches and honor.

May it please the Lord who formed the world, that we may be of the number of his Elect to stand in his courts? Thanks unto God.

Amen.

CHAPTER - THE THEOLOGY OF THE VALLENSES DURING THE PERIOD OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY FROM the period of the twelfth century, we descend to the period of the thirteenth and, here, Pilichdorf, and the Author of the Index of Valdensic Errors, and Conrad of Magdenberg, will prove usefully concurrent witnesses.

I. According to the first of these, Pilichdorf, the Valdenses, who, through the unwearied missionary labors of Peter Valdo and his Gallican Proselytes, had now, in their various offshoots, been spread far beyond the limits of their native mountains, held the following opinions.

They contended that They and their associates were exclusively the few Elect; while their adversaries, the corrupt Romanists, were the many called. They maintained: that The Virgin and the Saints are so filled with heavenly joy, as to be unable to regard what is done upon earth; and that, Inasmuch as they cannot pray for us, they ought not to be invoked by us. In immediate connection with this dogma, they contended: that God alone ought to be praised and honored and invocated and served; that, Since he alone redeemed us, he alone can help us; that The merits of the Saints cannot be applied to us, because they belong only to themselves; that, Since God well knows what is necessary for us, be requires not to be moved by the prayers of the Saints; that, What he wills, all the Saints will; and, therefore, that We ought not to invoke the Saints, but God exclusively and alone. They asserted: that, After this life, there are no more than two ways to the departed; and, consequently, that There is no such place or condition as Purgatory. They taught’ that There is no greater benefit to be obtained by burial in a consecrated cemetery, than in any other place. 5 Agreeably to this principle, they said: that A material Church, dedicated or consecrated by a Romish Bishop, was neither better nor holier nor worthier than any other house, since God both could be adored and ought to be adored everywhere. In like manner, they reprobated the consecration of sacerdotal and pontifical robes, water, salt, ashes, candles, food at the time of Easter, and all other things which are consecrated by bishops and priests: and they rejected also the consecration of bishops, priests, churches, altars, cemeteries, baptismal water, unctions of chrism and oil, palms, branches, and herbs; saying, that Things thus consecrated derived no particular sanctity from the words used, though the words themselves might be good. They reprobated the indulgences of the prelates of the Church, together with pilgrimages to the thresholds of saints and the year of jubilee: and this they did, as we learn from the counter-reasoning of Pilichdorf, on the ground of rejecting the whole system of human meritoriousness, more especially as it appears in its worst form of supererogation. All images and the worship of them they utterly abominated: and, for this, as Pilichdorf admits, they seemed to have authorities from Scripture; though, ludicrously enough, he is quite satisfied, that he can dispose of them all and solve every apparent difficulty. To oaths of every description they objected. II. The Author of the Index of Valdensic Errors, subjoined by Gretzer to the Work of Pilichdorf, has contributed some important additional notices.

In the beneficial potency of the sign of the cross, the Valdenses had no faith’ for they were wont to declare, that They would venerate, neither the very cross upon which Christ hung, nor the crown of thorns, nor the nails, nor the spear, nor the garment without seam, even if they could behold the really genuine articles themselves; inasmuch as the veneration of all such things is vain and useless, being merely contrived by the priests for the sake of filthy lucre. To the sayings of the Saints they paid no regard, except in so far as they might be confirmatory to their own sect: for they admitted only the authority of the New Testament; and this they observed to the very letter. General confession they made no account of. Miracles, performed in the Church of God through the merits of the saints, they utterly rejected. They said: that The Pope is the head of all heresiarchs . All Religious Orders of Monks and Sanctimonials they reprobated: saying, that They are vain and superfluous. They maintained: that All the words of the Mass, and all the preparations appertaining to the Mass, beyond the simple words of consecration, are of error. III. Various other matters of less moment have been omitted: and if there should be any doubt as to the import of the last specified particular, it is effectually solved by their own explanatory language as reported by Conrad of Magdenberg.

They blaspheme, says he, the Priesthood of Christ, styling the Presbyters in the Church of God, by way of mockery and derision, GOD-MAKERS. Nevertheless, the Priests themselves make not God: but only, through the words of consecration instituted by Christ, under the species of bread and wine mixed with water, they make our Lord Christ to be corporeally present who was not corporeally present before, the Holy Spirit operating the transubstantiation of this oblation so as to make God. Conrad is here speaking of the Beghards or Pighards or Picards. But this was the name, by which, from the circumstance of their abounding in the neighbor province of Picardy, the Valdenses were wont to be styled in Germany. 19 Consequently, there can be no doubt touching the specific religionists, to whom he alludes. As for his language, it is useful to let a Romanist himself exhibit the blasphemous heresy of the Transubstantialists in all its naked deformity.

CHAPTER - THE THEOLOGY OF THE VALLENSES AT AND IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE TIME OF THE REFORMATION.

FOR the ascertaining of the Doctrinal System, maintained by the Vallenses, at and immediately after the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, I shall adduce two several authorities: the testimony, to wit, of Claude Scyssel Archbishop of Turin about the year 1500; and the confession, presented, in the year 1542, to Francis I. of France, through the medium of Cardinal Sadolet.

I. The testimony of Scyssel respects the Vallenses, who continued to occupy their ancient settlements in Piedmont, and who thence were geographically comprehended within the limits of the Archbishop’s diocese.

Scyssel’s Work, against what he calls the Errors and Sect of the Valdenses, is written, both with much bitterness, and with no small measure to boot of absurd inconsistency: for while he stoutly reviles the Heretics, as brute beasts quite unfit through their barbarous ignorance to enter into any argument; he nevertheless, in the same breath, tells us, that they were specially acute in the citation of Holy Scripture to establish their own opinions, exhibiting also some specimens of their reasoning which certainly show no defect either in knowledge or in dexterity. Their doctrines, he claims, of course, after the usual self-laudatory method of popish controversialists, to have refuted and exposed: and, for this purpose, he gives those doctrines, as professed by them at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Now, upon examination, we shall find’ that their theological principles had, in no respect, varied from those, which they are attested to have maintained at an earlier period.

They acknowledged no authoritative rule of faith save the Bible: receiving only, what was expressly said by Christ or handed down by his Apostles, and rejecting the glosses of the popish doctors, they followed it, in its plain and obvious sense, according to the letter. Deeming the Church of Rome the Babylonian Harlot, and asserting their own Church to be the alone true Catholic Church of Christ, they paid no regard to the ecclesiastical censures of the Popish Prelates and Clergy. The vital doctrine of Justification through the alone merits of Christ they firmly maintained: asserting, that men required not the suffrages of the Saints, Christ only being to all abundantly sufficient for all things. Purgatory they altogether rejected; affirming that departed spirits passed immediately to a state either of happiness or of misery: and they pronounced, that the payment of money, in reference to the expiation of the souls of the deceased by penal sufferings, is a foolish and destructive superstition; the whole fable having been invented by the Priests for their own sordid emolument. They maintained, that, with one or two exceptions at the utmost, the contraction of matrimony is freely open to all degrees of men: and, in every other ease, they denied to the Pontiffs the right of prohibition. The power of absolution by the Priests, and the necessity of confession to them, they entirely disallowed. All worship of the Virgin and the Saints they rejected, as idolatry: and thence they threw aside those prayers addressed to them, which had been composed even by the highest doctors of the Church. The tenet of Transubstantiation they denied and derided: and, though Scyssel describes them as mere babblers upon this point, he waives all argument with these dreadfully inconclusive reasoners, on the ground; that even the faithful themselves and the most skillful theologians, so far from being capable of understanding so deep a mystery, were unable even to deliver it to others. All benedictions of cemeteries and holy water and oratories and ecclesiastical ornaments they affirmed to be utterly useless. 10 The adoration of images they strenuously opposed: and Scyssel himself admits, that, if they stated the practice of the Romanists fairly, their sentiments would be correct. Much abuse is poured upon them by the Archbishop, on the ground, that they made no scruple of contracting marriages, which the Romanists deemed incestuous 12 : but he is constrained to admit, that their conduct was exemplary. They commonly, says he, lead a purer life than other Christians. Except by compulsion, they swear not: and they rarely take the name of God in vain. They fulfil their promises with all good faith: and, living for the most part in poverty, they protest, that they alone preserve the apostolical life and doctrine. On this account, they assert, that the power of the Church resides with themselves, as being the innocent and true disciples of Christ: for whose faith and religion, to live in poverty, and to suffer persecution from us, they esteem honorable and glorious. II. Such were the Vallenses of Piedmont at the beginning of the sixteenth century’ I shall now pass to the Confession, presented, in the year 1542, to the King of France.

To this document, as preserved by Crispin, there is a peculiarity attached, which renders it eminently valuable.

In the year 1342, a date brought out by the specification of two centuries before the year 1542, a colony of the Vallenses of Piedmont planted themselves at Merindol and Cabriere on the western side of the Cottian Alps’ and there by dint of hard labor, brought an uninhabited desert into a state of such high cultivation, that they supplied all Provence with corn, wine, oil, honey, almonds, flocks, and herds. Such being the case, their Confession may justly be viewed, as connecting the latter part of the middle ages with the times of the Reformation-for it may be considered, as exhibiting the faith of the Vallenses, on either side of the Cottian Alps, through a period of two entire centuries; or from the year 1342 when the emigration took place, down to the year 1542 when the Confession was drawn up and delivered to the French King by Cardinal Sadolet.

OF THIS CONFESSION, THE FOLLOWING, IN BRIEF, ARE THE ARTICLES.

We all believe and confess: that the Holy Scripture, as contained in the Old and New Testament, was written by divine inspiration.- From the teaching of the same Scripture, we confess and believe: that there is one God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: distinct in three persons, and subsisting in one spiritual and eternal essence: who, by his mighty power and infinite goodness, originally created and still preserves all things.- We hold it for certain: that the Son of God came into this world, and voluntarily submitted to be clothed in human flesh; on which thing alone the mystery of the Christian Religion is constituted: for, in that name, our whole hope and faith rest upon Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Lord, the admirable God, the author of eternal life, the sole savior and justifier and sanctifier and interpreter and patron of mankind; and the sole sacrificer also, whence there is no need of a successor. Also we hold it for certain: that he is truly God and truly man.

We believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ was conceived of the Holy Ghost without the intervention of a man, as the angel announced before his conception; in order that he, whose procreation ought to be free from all sin, might be born holy and upright.

We believe and confess: that Jesus Christ without any taint of original sin, was born in Bethlehem from the Virgin Mary; and that he assumed a body, like unto our bodies in all things, sin only excepted, to which he could not be obnoxious.- We believe and confess: that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, for our sins; and that he alone is the true Paschal Lamb, offered as a victim, that he might snatch us from the jaws of the devil.- We believe and confess: that he descended into hell.- We believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ rose again on the third day from the dead for our justification.- We believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, forty days after his resurrection, ascended to heaven, and withdrew his bodily presence from these lower regions.- We believe and confess: that he sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.- We believe: that Jesus Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead once, at the last day of judgment.

We believe and confess: that the Holy Ghost is the third person of the same essence with the Father and the Son, proceeding from the same Father and Son, and equal to each of them.- We believe and confess: that there is one Holy Catholic Church, which is the Congregation and Assembly of all true believers faithful and elect of God, who have been from the beginning of the world, and shall be to the end; of which Church Jesus Christ is the head.

We believe and confess: that there is a free remission of sins, proceeding from the mercy and mere goodness of our Lord Christ; who died once for our sins, the just for the unjust; who took away our sins in his own body upon the cross: — who is our advocate with God, the price of our reconciliation; — whose blood cleanses our consciences from dead works, that we should serve the living God; — who alone made satisfaction for the faithful, so that their sins are not imputed to them, as to the unbelieving and the reprobate. We believe: that there is a resurrection of the flesh of the blessed of God, to possess the kingdom of heaven for ever; as also a resurrection of the cursed of God, to perpetual fire and torment.

We believe also: that souls are immortal; but that the souls of the faithful, as soon as they migrate from this body, pass immediately to the glory of heaven; — and that the souls of the unbelieving and the reprobate, as soon as they depart from their bodies, pass to the torments of bell until the day of judgment and the resurrection of the, flesh, that so, both body and soul, they may be eternally tormented in the gehenna of inextinguishable fire.

We believe: that eternal life is offered to us by the grace of God through Christ, who is truly our life, and who endured death that the faithful might become heirs of eternal life.

We believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, having abolished Circumcision, instituted Baptism, through which we are received into the Church of the people of God. — This outward Baptism exhibits to us another inward Baptism; namely, the Grace of God which cannot be seen with the eyes. The Apostles and other ministers of the Church baptize, using the word of God in order to a sacrament; and give only the visible sign: but the Lord Jesus Christ, the chief shepherd, alone gives the increase, and causes that we may receive the things signified. — They greatly err, who deny Baptism to the children of Christians.

We believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ afterward ordained the sacrament of the Supper, which is the giving of thanks and the remembrance of the death and passion of Jesus Christ, rightly celebrated in the Assembly of God’s People. There the bread and wine are distributed and taken, as visible signs and representations of holy things: that is to say, of the body and blood of Jesus Christ offered upon the cross for the remission of our sins and for the reconciliation of mankind with God.

Whosoever believeth, that Jesus Christ delivered his body and shed his blood for the remission of sins: he eats the flesh and drinks the blood of the Lord, and becomes a partaker of both: considering the agreement, of those things which are subjected to the eyes, and of the food by which the body is sustained, with those things which are not seen and with spiritual food. For, as the body, in this life, is strengthened with bread; and as wine recreates the heart of man: so, likewise, the body of Jesus Christ delivered unto death, and his blood shed for us, nourish and confirm and refresh the sad and affected soul. But let not any one imagine, that the visible sign is so conjoined or conglutinated with the invisible thing signified, as to be incapable of separation; insomuch that the one cannot be received without the other: for Judas, indeed, received the sign; but the thing signified he did not receive, nor was be ever made a partaker of the body and blood of Christ. — The opinion of some, therefore, is not to be received, who believe, that the true and natural body of Christ, his flesh and his bones, exist and lie hid in that bread of the Supper, or that any transmutation of the one into the other is effected. For this opinion is repugnant to the word of God and contrary to the articles of our faith, in which it is clearly set forth: that Christ ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; whence, also, he will come, to judge the quick and the dead. But the Lord Jesus Christ is present in the sacrament of the Supper; by the power and virtue and presence of his Spirit in the hearts of his elect and faithful. — They also, who affirm that in the Supper the body of Christ is eaten corporally, do err: for the. flesh, when eaten, profiteth nothing; it is the Spirit, which quickeneth. Therefore, the truly faithful of Jesus Christ eat his flesh and drink his blood spiritually in their hearts. We believe and confess: that the sincere worship of God consists, in obedience to his will, and in the use of all our diligence to attain to it. — The end of the commandment is, to obey God in true charity, from a pure and upright heart and a good conscience and faith without dissimulation. — We confess: that the knowledge of sin comes from an understanding of the Law, which points out to us our own imbecility, so that no mortal can perfectly fulfil it; for all men are sinners. — We confess: that good works which God has prepared that we should walk in them, and which God has propounded in his word, ought to be done and studiously accomplished: not, indeed, through hope of meriting any thing at God’s hand, or through fear of eternal perdition, but for that duty and love which we ought to bear to our common Father.- We believe and confess: that, agreeably to the divine commandments, we must, in all things, preserve sobriety and continence; also that fasting is enjoined to us in Scripture, which consists in the affliction and humiliation of the body, though not for the mere purpose of afflicting the flesh, but for the purpose of making us more lively and more fit for prayer.- We confess: that, in the Old Testament, certain foods are prohibited; but that, through Christ, the free use of them is granted to Christians.- We confess: that Kings, Princes, and Magistrates, are persons constituted of God; in order to bear the sword, for the defense of the good, and for the punishment of the bad. Obedience, therefore, is due to them, not only for wrath’s sake, but also for conscience sake. — We confess: that Ministers and Pastors of the Church ought to be an example to the flock and to the faithful, in discourse, conversation, charity, faith, and chastity; being preeminent in preaching the word of God and in persevering in sincere doctrine.

But covetous Pastors; who, for the sake of base gain, under pretext of God’s worship, introduce false doctrine; — who profane the temple of God, making it a den of thieves; who, profess themselves able, for money, to redeem souls out of purgatory, as they speak; who, for a price, promise pardon and remission of sins; who sell bad works these impostors, sacrilegers, and idolaters, ought, by the authority of Kings and Magistrates, to be removed from their degree; and, in their place, others ought to be substituted. These were the doctrines of the Vallenses at the time of the Reformation: doctrines, handed down and preserved among them, through a long line of ancestors, from the very days of the Primitive Church Catholic.

Previous to their delivering their Confession to Cardinal Sadolet, through the Court of the Province and the Bishop of Carillon, they professed themselves willing to abjure any point, which, from God’s word, could be proved heretical. 18 And, after it had been delivered in and duly recited preparatory to its being read before the King, an honest Doctor in Theology, employed by the Bishop of Carillon to examine it, fairly confessed; that he had never been so much astonished as he was, when he had duly weighed the articles of their faith, and had diligently compared them with the testimonies of Holy Writ which were adduced for the confirmation of their Confession: freely acknowledging, that, in his whole life, he had not made such a proficiency in the divine Writings, as he had done in the course of the eight days, during which he had been compelled to examine the passages of Scripture cited in those articles. III. Harassed and persecuted as the Vallenses had long been, and reduced perpetually as they were to poverty and thence to that comparative ignorance which attends upon the want of a regular education, they obtained, I doubt not, a considerable degree of improvement, in the accurate and scholastic statement of their doctrines, from the more logical and better instituted reformers of the sixteenth century. Thus far, we may readily concede to Bossuet, in the precise case of the Vallenses of Merindol. 20 Accordingly, as Crispin tells us, we find them, with much humility and with a beautifully ready acknowledgment of their incompetence, sparing no pains to acquire religious information and instruction. 21 But, that they borrowed little beyond precision of language and goodness of arrangement, is, I think, plain, from the consistent and never-varying evidence which has already been produced. Accordingly, as the same Crispin distinctly informs us, they steadily claimed, without any infection of heresy, to have ALWAYS taught and maintained the pure doctrine of the Gospel. With this view of the matter, their own language perfectly corresponds.

Ever prophesying in sackcloth, and driven by brutal persecution to take refuge in dens and caves of the earth, the confession of their deputation to Ecolampadius, in the year 1530, bespeaks, I think, on the part of the Vallenses, rather a want of regular education, than any theological or biblical ignorance in the strict and proper sense of the expression. We are, said they, the teachers, such teachers as we are, of a certain unworthy and poor little people. — Yet, in all things, we agree with you: and, from the very time of the Apostles, our sentiments respecting the faith have been the same as your own. In this matter alone we differ: that through our own fault and through the slowness of our genius, we do not understand the inspired writers so accurately as yourselves. There is something wonderfully touching, and singularly savoring of primitive evangelical humility, in this language on the part of a most remotely ancient Church; which refused the title of a Reformed Church, on the honorable ground that it had never needed reformation. 24 Bossuet, indeed, pleads strenuously for Vallensic ignorance: but they, who are aware that an intimate and deeply practical knowledge of the grand essentials of the Gospel may subsist without the possession of a regular scholastic education, will be apt to think; that those, whose ancestors are recorded by an enemy to have had the whole of the New Testament by heart with considerable portions of the Old Testament also, undervalued themselves through modesty; and that, merely because they did not adopt the overweening style of self-satisfied conceit, their words are not to be taken with all the severity of a strictly literal interpretation. 25 CHAPTER - RESPECTING THE POOR MEN OF LYONS OR THE MISSIONARY VALDENSES OF FRANCE IN establishing the Antiquity of the Vallenses of Piedmont, I brought down their history, until, in the twelfth century, they stand connected with the Vallenses of France. 1 Resuming the subject, I shall now give some account of these modern Leonists, as they are styled by the Inquisitor Reinerius Sacco.

Perhaps, through the whole range of ecclesiastical story, there can scarcely be mentioned an individual, who in the hand of God has been more eminently an instrument for good, than the rich and holy merchant Peter of Lyons.

This illustrious reformer began his labors about the year 1160: and he is commonly thought to have died about the year 1179. He was the founder of the comparatively modern Society of the Poor Men of Lyons; and to them he imparted the name of Valdenses, derived from his own agnomen of Valdo or Valdes or Valdensis or Valdensius or Valdius; for, in all these slightly varied forms, does the agnomen occur. I. Thus far, the matter is perfectly clear: but, although Peter communicated to his new Society the title of Valdenses, the question still remains, whence he himself derived his own agnomen.

With respect to this question, the very form of that agnomen shows, with sufficient clearness, that it cannot be viewed as the proper family name of the wealthy merchant; that is to say, as his family name after the manner in which family names are now borne. It is evidently a title imposed, either from some town, or from some people, or from some country, or from some circumstance connected with Peter’s own religious sentiments.

Accordingly, we are told: that he received the name from a town or district named Valdis or Vaudra or Valden, which is indifferently said to have been situated in the march of France or in the borders of France: for, in the middle ages, the term march was applied to all border countries; whence the Count or Warden of the Marches received the title of Margrave or Marquis.

On this point, simply, there is an universal agreement: but, if we descend to particulars, there is a slight apparent variation. I say apparent: because, in reality, when one account, that given by the Centuriators of Magdeburg, represents his family, as having originated from that place or district; and when another account, that given by John Masson, speaks of him, as having been himself born there; and when yet a third account, that given by Pilichdorf, describes him, as having once been a citizen of Valden: there is nothing at all incongruous or irreconcilable in these several statements. Rather, indeed, I apprehend, that they each convey a portion of the truth: so that, from them all combined, we learn; that Peter was born in Valdis or Valden of a family belonging to that country, and that he himself had lived there in his youth before he settled as a merchant at Lyons.

Now, if these concurring statements are to be viewed as intimating nothing more, than that Peter received his agnomen from some place called Valdis or Valden or Vaudra vaguely described as situated somewhere near the extensive frontier of France: they will not explain his very peculiar conduct, when his mind first became deeply and vitally impressed with the importance of religion.

Luther, trained a Papist from his childhood, and having at the age of about twenty years finished his course of philosophy at Erfurt, happened one day to walk in the fields with an intimate friend and associate. A violent thunderstorm came on: and his companion, by a stroke of lightning, was killed at his side. This awful occurrence produced a mighty effect upon the mind of the future reformer: but, in what outward demonstration, did that effect show itself? Precisely in such a demonstration, as might have been anticipated from the School of Theology in which he had been nurtured.

He determined to withdraw himself from the world and to enter into a monastery at Erfurt. His father strongly remonstrated: but the son was inflexible, as to what he deemed a manifest vocation from heaven; and the result was his taking upon himself the vows of monasticism.

Now, by Reinerius, we are informed, that a very similar occurrence befell the opulent merchant of Lyons, whose name indeed he does not mention, but whom he sufficiently identifies, by describing him as the founder of the sect of the Poor Men, and by afterward specifying a sect under the precise name of Valdenses. When, on some public occasion, the more wealthy or the more dignified citizens were assembled together, it happened, that one of the number suddenly dropped down dead. By this event the mind of Peter was as much impressed, as that of Luther was by the instantaneous removal of his friend: and, since the same causes usually produce pretty much the same effects, we may safely infer; that, if the previous sentiments of Peter had been identical with the previous sentiments of Luther, in that case, just as the poor student Luther, under the influence of those sentiments became a monk, so, under the influence of the same sentiments, the rich merchant Peter would have devoted his wealth to the erection of an Abbey, and would himself have become (what the Papists call) one of the Religious in his own munificent foundation. So, from such premises, we may fairly infer’ but, in truth, this was not the case. Instead of acting, proportionally to the difference of his rank in life, like Luther’ Peter distributed his substance among the poor; devoted himself altogether to the profession of the Gospel; caused the Scriptures to be translated into the vulgar tongue; began eagerly to make proselytes to what (so far as mere speculation is concerned) must plainly have been his already adopted sentiments; and sent them forth throughout the whole world, to denounce the Roman Church as the Babylon of the Apocalypse, and to warn all men against partaking of her abominations. Here we have a case totally different from that of Luther. Peter had speculatively held sentiments the very opposite to those which Luther entertained when he threw himself into a monastery: and, as soon as his mere speculation began to be practically operative, the result was that which has been stated. On evangelical principles, he declared war against the Roman Church: and, thus acting, we find him distinguished by the agnomen of Valdes or Valdensis or Valdius or (as the word would be expressed, in French) Le Vaudois.

With these matters before us, we shall, I think, view the preceding statements, as intimating something much more definite and particular than some uncertain place, either of Peter’s family origination, or of his own personal nativity, or of his early residence in the way of his mercantile business. 1. The place, or district, it seems, was called Valdis or Valden or (in a gallican form) Vaudra; and it was situated in the marches or upon the borders of France.

What, then, was this place’ and where are we to seek it definitely and precisely?

Truly, both the very name of the place, and its descriptive geographical situation, alike refer us to the Valleys or the Valden of Piedmont and Dauphiny: for the ancient or proper Vallerises, those primeval Leonists whom Reinerius notes to be the oldest of all known sects, occupied the Valleys on either side of the Cottian Alps.

Originally, on the breaking up of the Western Empire, Dauphiny was within the limits of the kingdom of Arles, itself a member of the kingdom of the Burgundians: and, thence, it became a fief of the restored empire under Charlemagne. But, in the middle of the fourteenth century, it was annexed to France. Still, however, in either case, the Valleys of the Cottian Alps were always a march country: for, situated as they were on the borders of France and Savoy, they constituted the marches, as the phrase ran, of both those neighboring Sovereignties. Hence, in the eleventh century, we find Peter Damian addressing the Dutchess Adelaide of Savoy, as the Marchioness or the March-Countess or the Lady March- Warden of the Cottian Alps. Here, then, was that march or border country of France — whence, either from birth, or from family origin, or from early inhabitation, Peter received his agnomen of Valdo or Valdes or Valdensis or Le Vaudois. The marchland region, called Valdis or Valden or Vaudra, was plainly no other, than the border Valley district of the ancient Vallenses or Leonists. Such, in whatever precise mode, being the connection of Peter with the Vallenses of Dauphiny and Piedmont, we shall now have no difficulty in accounting for the form which his sudden religious impression assumed’ a form, so essentially different from any that could have been produced by the papally superstitious spirit of the age in which he lived. Either by birth, or by origin, or by early inhabitation, the wealthy merchant was a Valdensis or Vaudes or Vaudois. With the pure and primitive doctrine of the pious Dalesman, he had long, most probably from his very childhood, been acquainted: but the full occupation of successful traffic, and the consequent increase of worldly opulence and worldly respectability, had choked the word, so that it became unfruitful in a thorny soil of mere speculative knowledge. But the Lord had a purpose of mercy for the individual: and, through him, had a purpose also of great and abiding, and extensive good to his sincere Church. An awful dispensation, witnessed by the merchant, while seated among his brother burgesses of Lyons in all the pride of place municipal, proved effectual and decisive. It spoke to his sleeping conscience, with a voice of thunder. And the result was precisely in accordance with the previous speculative illumination of his understanding. 2. In point of connection, here it is, that Peter and his new French Society join themselves to the ancient Vallenses of Italy: and thus, agreeably to the explicit testimony of Conrad of Ursperg, that The Valdenses, in both their divisions, originated, at a remote period, in Italy, they appear as a gallican branch springing out of the parent stock which had long flourished in the Valdis or Valden or Vaudra of the bordering Cottian Alps. This circumstance fully accounts for the peculiar language of Reinerius in his Treatise concerning Heretics’ language, which, with some modern writers, has led, most unfortunately, to blunders and misapprehensions of no ordinary magnitude.

The Leonists, he tells us, are to be ranked among the sects ofANCIENT Heretics; for they are older than either the Arians or the Manicheans or any other of the seventy sects which had once existed, but which had then become extinct. while the poor men of Lyons, who are also, as well as the members of the older sect from which they had branched out, denominated Leonists, are a sect of aMODERN Heretics; having been founded, as late as the twelfth century, by an opulent merchant of that city. Though, on the first survey, these two statements are apparently discordant; they will, on examination, be found perfectly to agree with each other.

The proselyted French Valdenses, considered as a congregation gathered out of those who were previously members of the Roman Church, were no older than Peter the Valdo: but, in point of ultimate theological pedigree, when considered as a branch or continuation of the ancient Vallenses of Dauphiny and Piedmont, they were, agreeably to their own true and perpetual allegation, as old as the times of the Apostles themselves.

Hence, in France, the name of Valdenses occurs not until after the commencement of Peter’s ministry: for the first writer who mentions the name as sectarially connected with that country, is Walter Mapes in the year 1179. Thus we see, how utterly repugnant to historical testimony is the assertion of Bossuet: that The Valdenses so owed their origin to Peter Valdo, as to have had no existence in any part of the world previous to his time. Thus also, on the specific ground taken up by himself, we may perceive the absolute childishness of his objection to the antiquity of the Vallensic Treatise on Antichrist.

Some unknown collector, he states, ascribes the Treatise to an early part of the twelfth century. But the very founder of the Valdenses did not commence his ministry until after the year 1160. Therefore the antiquity of the Treatise must be purely fictitious. Now, whether in itself that Treatise be or be not a genuine relic of antiquity, at all events, this objection, which is insecurely based, partly upon the mere guess of an unknown collector, and partly upon the false assertion that the Valdenses corporately are not older than the time of Peter of Lyons, furnishes no proof that it is a modern fabrication. The Treatise, I admit, is not so ancient as the beginning of the twelfth century.

But what then? The mere random circumstance of a collector’s having erroneously ascribed it to an early part of the twelfth century, even if, on Bossuet’s theory, Peter of Lyons were really the founder of the entire Church of the Valdenses, would afford no very satisfactory evidence that it must have been the production of a modern writer; a writer, for instance, who flourished subsequently to the age of the Reformation.

II. During many centuries, as I have already observed, the old Vallenses seem rarely to have departed from their native Valleys. Their testimony was, indeed, faithfully borne against their immediate papalising neighbors: and there, as we have seen, their existence was well known to the governing powers and to the influential members of the Roman Church.

But, a simple and primitive race, strongly attached to their mountain fastnesses, we hear not of them out of their own direct vicinage · for, as Bossuet justly remarks, it was an error of Gretser (and, I may add, of Mariana also, and of other Jesuits), in a much later age, unskillfully and vaguely to apply the name of Valdenses to those who were really Albigenses. With Peter the Vaudois, however, a new succession of ages commences: and, what his alpine brethren (his brethren, apparently, after the flesh, as well as; after the spirit) had hitherto wanted, the Christian zeal of the enlightened and liberal merchant amply supplied. Under the name of the Poor Men of Lyons, he instituted a special order of Preachers or Missionaries: who, instead of quietly vegetating at home from generation to generation, should go forth, like the wandering Albigenses, into the world at large, and should thus carry the Gospel to every quarter of Europe. 1. Of this peculiarity in the new local sect of MODERN Heretics, as Reinerius styles and describes them, we have abundant historical testimony. (1.) Reinerius himself, in his Treatise edited by Marten, gives us some very valuable information respecting the present particular.

The Sect of the Leonists is composed of members of two different descriptions.

Some of them are distinguished by the name of The Perfect: but, of these, the strictly proper designation is, The Poor Valdenses of Lyons. 16 Into this form, all are not admitted indiscriminately: but the candidates are first trained in a long course of education, that so they may know how to teach others.

These say, that they possess nothing as individual property, neither houses nor lands nor certain mansions: and their wives, if they previously have any, they leave. They call themselves the successors of the Apostles: and, of the others, they are the Masters and the Confessors. Hence they circuit the country, visiting their disciples and confirming them in their error. To these, their disciples minister things necessary. Into whatever place they come, their Laity contrive mutually to insinuate among each other the knowledge of their arrival. Then many, for the purpose of secretly hearing and seeing them, congregate to them in some place of safety: and there they send to them the best meat and drink.

Here they appoint to the disciples collections of money, to be made for the support of the said Poor Men and their Masters and their students, who are unable to supply their own expenses; or indeed, likewise, in order to allure some whom the desire of money draws to their sect. (2.) Walter Mapes similarly exhibits the Poor Men of Lyons or the Perfect Brethren under the aspect of Preachers or Missionaries, when, in the year 1179, he first mentions their name of Valdesians or Valdenses.

We saw, in the Council of Rome celebrated under Pope Alexander III certain illiterate individuals, called from their Primate Valdes who bad been a citizen of Lyons upon the Rhone,VALDESIANS.

These persons presented, to the Lord Pope, a book written in the French Tongue; wherein were contained the text and gloss of the Psalter and likewise of very many books of both the two Laws: and, with much urgency, they petitioned, that the authority of preaching might be confirmed to them; for though they had lived mere sciolists, they seemed to themselves to be skillful and wellinstructed clerks.- I, the least of the many thousands who bad been called, derided them; because, in the matter of their petition, there might be doubt or discussion: and, being invited by a certain great Prelate to whom that supreme Pope had enjoined the charge of confessions, I shot an arrow at the mark. For, many prudent men and well skilled in the law being called in, two Valdesians, who seemed the chief of their sect, were brought to me, that they might dispute with me concerning the faith: not, however, from any love of inquiring after truth; but purely that I might be confuted, and that my mouth might be stopped as if I spoke absurdities.

Now I sat, I must own, with a considerable feeling of timidity, lest, for my sins, the grace of speech should be denied to me in so great a Council. But the Prelate commanded me to set myself in force against them: and they prepared to answer me.

First, then, I propounded the most trifling questions; such as no person ought to be ignorant of: as knowing, that, when an ass is munching thistles, he is eating the lettuce which best befits him.

Believe ye in God the Father? They answered: We believe. And in God the Son? They answered: We believe. And in the Holy Ghost?

Still they answered: We believe. I then reiterated: And in the mother of Christ? Again they gave the same answer: We believe.

Upon this, with a manifold clamor, they were derided by all: and they retired in confusion. And well, indeed, they might do so: for they were ruled by none; and yet, like Phaethon who did not so much as know the names of his horses, they wished to be rulers themselves.

These men have no where any fixed domiciles; but they travel about two and two, naked as to their feet, clad in coarse woollen garments, having nothing, holding all things in common like the Apostles, following naked a naked Christ. They begin, at present, with the utmost humility; because they cannot get in a single foot: but, if once we admit them, we shall soon be ourselves expelled. (3.) The rude treatment experienced by these good men at the Papal Court in the year 1179, which Walter Mapes seems most unaccountably to have mistaken for wit, did not deter their successors from making a second application in the year 1212. A description of it is given by Conrad of Lichtenau, Abbot of Ursperg: and it is marked by the same characteristics of the disciples of Peter, as those which were associated with the former application. The statement of Conrad is yet further important: because, as I have already observed, it distinctly intimates the ultimate Italian or Vallensic origin of the French Community founded by Peter Valdo.

Formerly, two sects sprang up in Italy, which still continue to exist. One of these bears the name of the Humiliated: the other, that of the Poor Men of Lyons. Pope Lucius once enrolled them among Heretics: because certain superstitious opinions and practices were found among them. In their secret preachings, moreover, which they commonly made in lurking places, they derogated from the Church of God and the Priesthood.

At that time, in the year 1212 to wit, we saw some of the number of those, who were called Poor Men of Lyons, at the Apostolic See, with a certain master of theirs, as I think, Bernard by name: and these petitioned, that the Apostolic See would confirm and privilege their sect.

The account, truly, which they gave of themselves, was: that they led the life of the Apostles; and that, wishing neither to possess any thing nor to have any certain place of residence, they went in a circuit through the villages and to the castles. But the Lord Pope objected to them certain superstitious matters in their conversation: as, for instance, that they preached in shoes which covered only the upper part of the foot, walking as it were with their feet naked; and, moreover, that, while they wore certain caps as if belonging to some Religious Order, they polled the hair of their heads only in the same fashion as the Laity. This also seemed opprobrious in their case: that men and women walked together in the way, and commonly remained together in the same house; so that it was said of them, that they sometimes slept together in the same bed. All which things nevertheless, they asserted to have descended to them from the Apostles. The women, no doubt, who shocked the concubinarian purity of the Romish Priesthood by thus travelling with men that seemed to belong to a sort of Religious Order, were the wives of the missionaries: though, from the inconvenience attendant upon such a practice, they had, shortly afterward (we have seen) when the Inquisitor Reinerius wrote, discontinued it. Yet, as it was justly alleged, the practice itself was apostolical. Conrad, indeed, who most probably was a very inferior scripturist to the well read Valdenses, might, as appears from the turn of his phraseology, be ignorant of the biblically-recorded circumstance. 20 But the Poor Men of Lyons had read the question propounded by St. Paul: and thence felt themselves authorized in asserting, that the practice of travelling with their lawful wives had descended to them from the Apostles. 2. Papal disapprobation was rapidly followed by papal persecution: but, as Archbishop Usher well observes, persecution produced no other effect, than that, which, of old, resulted from the murder of the protomartyr Stephen; a matter, fully attested by the Inquisitor Eymeric in the fourteenth century.

When the Poor men could not rest at Lyons, fearing the Archbishop and the Church, they fled from that city: and, being dispersed through the parts of France and Italy, they had very many accomplices; and, down even to the present day, they have in various districts abundantly sown their errors. 3. Thus, on amply sufficient evidence, the historian Thuanus was induced to write in manner following.

Peter Valdo, the ringleader of the Valdenses, leaving his own country, went into Belgium: and, in Picardy, as they now call the province, obtained many followers. Passing thence into Germany, he long sojourned among the Vandalic States, and finally settled in Bohemia: where those, who, at the present day, embrace his doctrine, are, on that account called Picards. III. Such being the origin of the Poor Men of Lyons, we shall probably be not a little surprised at the grave statement put forth by Bossuet.

When they first separated themselves from the Church, they had only very few dogmas contrary to our own: perhaps, indeed, none totally. — Their system was, in truth, a species of Donatism. Certainly, if such were the case with the rich Valdensic merchant and his proselytes, at least to the extent specified by the Bishop of Meaux, we cannot view them, at the time when their labors commenced, as continuing the perpetuity of the faithful Church, however justly we may claim the Vallenses of Piedmont. The allegation, however, is so remarkable, that it well deserves to be carefully examined.

So far as I can find, the evidence for the allegation, as adduced by Bossuet, resolves itself into three points: the application, on the part of the Poor Men, to the Pope, for his license to act as preachers; and the asserted circumstance, that they held the doctrine of Transubstantiation; and the allegation, that their tenets scarcely differed from those of Rome. 1. The first of these, Bossuet does not state so strongly as he might have done. For he mentions only their application to Pope Innocent III. in the year 1212, as recorded by the Abbot of Ursperg — whereas, he might have considerably strengthened his point, by intimating, that this was in truth the second application; a former one having been made in the year 1179 to Pope Alexander III, as recorded by Walter Mapes.

Of course, the double fact, the particulars of which I have fully stated above, is readily admitted’ but we have to inquire, how far it can be made available for the purpose of the learned Prelate.

The individuals, who applied in the year 1179, were not native Piedmontise Subalpines, who had inherited their tenets from the most remote antiquity, and who thence felt no more scruples upon their minds respecting the self-entitled Catholic Church and its Pontifical Head than we Catholics in communion with the English Church feel at present: but they were French Proselytes from Popery, who thence, as we may well suppose, could not, even ill the course of several years, shake off the hereditary sense of dutiful subjection in which they had been educated.

This was precisely the case with Luther; who long wished to draw a line, between the imagined abstract holiness of an Ecclesiastical System, and the gross doctrinal corruptions of its managers and adherents. 26 Whence, if that wonderfully strong-minded man, in the far greater light of the sixteenth century, found such a conscientious difficulty in shaking off early impressions: it is surely small wonder, that the French Proselytes of Lyons should honestly labor under a similar delusion, and should wish, (if it were not absolutely impossible) to act under the sanction of the Pope rather than in direct and avowed opposition to his authority.

In the year 1212, when the second application was made, we may well suppose, that the feeling of hereditary prescriptive veneration would be greatly abated, or, in old converts, perhaps altogether extinguished: but there is small difficulty in conceiving, that pious and sober-minded men would think it proper to make yet another experiment (perhaps too in deference to the less matured convictions of younger converts), before they finally separated themselves from Rome, as utterly apostatic, and, in system as well as in mere individuals, obstinately incorrigible.

Under this impression (an impression, which, we know, long influenced the mighty mind of the Saxon Reformer), the second application, I suppose, was made; and, when the petition was absolutely refused, and when moreover two Orders of Friars were instituted with the direct object of counteraction; the pious and scrupulous French Valdenses would then feel, that, for the preservation of peace and unity, they had done all that they could do conscientiously.(Matthew 10:11; Acts 18:6.)

In such a view of the matter, I am the more confirmed, because we find not, that any step of this description was taken in the life-time of Peter himself. The first application was made in the very year of his death: and, after an interval of thirty-three years, it was followed by a second. Thus, in each instance, the applicants were the disciples of the good merchant, when he himself had been called to his reward.

Now this is precisely what we might expect. Peter, born and educated a Vaudois, though long possessed of knowledge merely speculative, had no hereditary scruples to master: he, therefore, went to work, without the least stay or hesitation; and, while he lived, he had sufficient influence with his converts to prevent any act of submission to Rome. But, as soon as he died, the honest fears and doubts of those who were only proselytes very naturally prevailed: and, to satisfy weak consciences, an attempt was made to procure the papal sanction. Nor was it, until after the failure of yet a second attempt, that the French Valdenses became fully satisfied, that there can be no religious concord, between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial.

Thus valueless is the first effort of Bossuet to show: that the French Valdenses differed little or nothing from the Romanists at the time of their original separation. 2. Nor is his second effort much more cogent and powerful than his first.

The Poor Men of Lyons, he contends, on the authority of Reinerius, so far from denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation, actually maintained it.

I have great doubts, whether Reinerius says really any such thing, as the Bishop puts into his mouth: for, after a mode not altogether uncommon with the French Prelate, a very important part of his testimony is entirely suppressed. According to Reinerius, in his Treatise concerning heretics, the Poor Men of Lyons said, indeed as the Bishop correctly states: that Transubstantiation does not take place in the hand of him who consecrates unworthily, but in the mouth of him who receives worthily. 28 But then, what the Bishop forgets to state, these same Poor Men, according to the same Reinerius in the same place of the same Treatise, also said: that the Mass is nothing because the Apostles had it not, and because it is celebrated for the sake of lucre; and that, beyond the precise words of Christ himself in the vulgar tongue, they could not receive the canon of the Mass; and that the oblation, made by Priests in the Mass, is nothing and profits nothing. This I apprehend, looks somewhat suspicious: and when we recollect that the term Transubstantiation was not brought into authorized ecclesiastical use until the year 1215, while the proselytism of the Poor Men was in active progress from the year 1160 to the year 1179, we are strongly tempted to conjecture, that Reinerius reported them rather in the phraseology of his adopted Church, than in their own proper phraseology; we are strongly tempted to conjecture, that what they really said was, that a beneficial reception of Christ’s body and blood depended, not upon the consecrating Priest, but upon the worthiness of the devout recipient.

It will be said, that this is conjecture. Be it so. Yet Bossuet, since he cites Reinerius as edited by the Jesuit Gretser, might as well, while his hand was in, have also cited Reinerius as edited by Marten: for there is, I believe, no doubt, that the Treatise, published by Marten as the Work of an anonymous author, and placed by him in his Thesaurus immediately after the Summa of Reinerius, is, in truth, the production of Reinerius himself.

Now, according to Reinerius, as speaking in this Work, the Poor Men of Lyons viewed the Eucharist in the same manner as all the Reformed Churches except the consubstantializing Church of the Lutherans. They believe not, says he, that the body and blood of Christ are truly present, but only blessed bread; which, in a certain figure, is called The Body of Christ: as it is said, That rock was Christ, and the like. 3. We shall now, perhaps hear no more of the French Valdenses being stout Transubstantialists: but still, if we may believe the Bishop of Meaux, when they first separated themselves, they maintained very few dogmas, perhaps indeed not a single one, contrary to those of Rome.

He builds, I suppose, upon the statement Reinerius, as edited by Marten: a supposition, which, if correct, involves the point, that he knew Reinerius to have mentioned the rejection of Transubstantiation by the Poor Men of Lyons, though he has thought it expedient to suppress such knowledge. Be this, however, as it may, Reinerius says only, that The contempt of ecclesiastical power was their first heresy, which, under the influence of Satan, precipitated them into innumerable errors: and those errors, or pretended errors, he afterward gives at full length. 31 But, in neither of his Treatises, nor yet in his Summa, does he give the slightest hint: that, at their first separation under the teaching of Peter Valdo, they differed little, if at all, from the Church of Rome; and that their sentiments, as stated by him, were of a much later growth. Let us, then, inquire, what dogmas these asserted papalising Valdenses are recorded to have held: and, that the inquiry may be quite unexceptionable, I shall resort to the Reinerius of Gretser.

The Valdenses say: that the Roman Church is not the Church of Jesus Christ: but that it is a Church of Malignants, and that it fell away under Sylvester when the venom of temporal possessions was infused into the Church. They say: that they themselves are the Church of Christ, because they observe the doctrine of Christ, agreeably to the words and examples of the Gospel and the Apostles. 34 They erroneously contend: that all vices and sins are in the Church; and that they themselves alone live justly. They falsely say: that, except themselves, almost no one preserves evangelical doctrine in the Church. They say: that they are the truly poor in spirit; and that, on account of righteousness and faith, they suffer persecution. They say: that they are the Church of Jesus Christ. They say: that the Roman Church, on account of her superfluous ornaments, is the Harlot in the Apocalyse. They say: that they despise all the statutes of the Church, because they are burdensome and too numerous. They say: that the Pope is the head of all errors. They say: that the Prelates are the Scribes; and the Religious Orders, the Pharisees. They say: that the Pope and all the Bishops are homicides on account of the wars which they stir up. They say: that we are not to obey the Prelates, but God alone. They condemn all the sacraments of the Church. They say: that the Church has erred in forbidding the Clergy to marry. If any thing be preached which cannot be proved by the text of the Bible, they deem it a mere fable. and they say, that Holy Scripture in the vulgar tongue has quite as beneficial an effect, as it has in the Latin language; whence they consecrate and give the sacraments in the vulgar tongue. They can repeat by heart, in the vulgar tongue, the whole text of the New Testament and great part of the Old: and, adhering to the text alone, they reject decretals and decrees with the sayings and expositions of the Saints. 48 They despise excommunication: and they disregard absolution. They reject the indulgences of the Church: and deride dispensations: and believe not, that a breach of Monastic Rule is sinful. They esteem none to be Saints, except the Apostles alone. They invocate no Saint: but pray to God exclusively. They despise canonisations, translations, and vigils, of the Saints. They laugh at the superstition of the Laity, in choosing tutelar Saints by lot at the altar. They never read the Litany: and they disbelieve the legends of the Saints. As for the miracles of the Saints, they make a mock at them: and their relics they despise. The holy cross they deem no better than a log of common wood. They abhor the sign of the cross on account of Christ’s punishment: nor do they ever sign themselves with it. They say: that the doctrine of Christ and the Apostles, without the statutes of the Church, is quite sufficient for salvation; and that the tradition of the Church is the tradition of the Pharisees. They despise all ecclesiastical customs, which are not read in the Gospel: such as Candlemas, Palm-Sunday, the Reconcilement of Penitents, the adoration of the Cross on Good-Friday, the Feast of Easter, and the Festivals of Christmas and the Saints. They despise, likewise, all dedications and benedictions and consecrations of candles, flesh, palms, chrism, fire, wax, and the like. Holy water they reckon no better than simple water. Images and pictures they pronounce to be idolatrous. Processions, whether festive or mournful, they reject. 64 They despise the sepulchre of the Lord and the sepulchres of the Saints. They say: that services for the dead, masses for the defunct, oblations at funerals, visitations of tombs, and suffrages for the departed, are no way profitable to souls. All these errors they hold, because they deny Purgatory, saying, that there are only two ways; one, of the elect to heaven; another, of the damned, to hell. They say: that one Pater Noster is worth more, than the jingling of ten bells and the Oblation of one Mass. These are the dutiful and conforming sons of the Church, with whom Bossuet is so delighted, that I must needs, in conclusion, repeat his wellmerited eulogium. When the Poor men of Lyons, says the Bishop of Meaux, separated themselves from the Church, they had only very few dogmas contrary to our own: perhaps, indeed, none totally. Their system was, in truth, a species of Donatism.