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The minister of La Tour is an old man, and was trained under an order of things unfavourable to that higher standard of pulpit qualification, and that fuller manifestation of evangelical and spiritual feeling, which, I am glad to say, characterize all the younger Waldensian pastors.
It also includes those churches which have been more recently added. As regards organization, the Waldensian is subdivided into parishes, and is governed by means of a general assembly of the parish, a consistory, synod, and table. The general assembly of the parish is composed of all the members of the church, being men who are twenty-five years of age.
Persecuted as they were, they never suffered the martyrdom of the ill-starred Waldensian colonies in Calabria. The houses of this Jewry overlook the Coscile river, the Sybaris of old, and from a spot in the quarter a steep path descends to its banks. Here you will find yourself in another climate, cool and moist.
Up till 1848 the Waldensian was proscribed, in both his civil and religious rights, beyond the limits of his own valleys. Out of his special territory he dared not possess a foot-breadth of land; and, if obliged to sell his paternal fields to a stranger, he could not buy them back again.
"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do:" many a true story of religious persecution, as of Inquisitorial torture, exacted by sincere bigotry, and endured by equally sincere conviction, would illustrate the prayer, and the scene might be laid among Waldensian saints and the friars of Madrid.
It is not true, as has sometimes been asserted, that they have ever rejected the practice of infant baptism. They have prepared and enjoined the use of a very sound and full catechism, in which the children of the Waldenses are carefully instructed previous to their admission to the Lord's table. So far we have sketched the leading points in the creed of the Waldensian Church.
It was at this time also, and from the circumstance that the pastors supplied from Geneva could only officiate in the French tongue, that the French language was used in worship. This brings me to notice the organization of the Waldensian Church as it now exists, and has existed for the last two hundred years.
Therefore about this time, as appears from the Waldensian book entitled Antichrist, the church of the valleys entered on what we call its second epoch, and became isolated as regards organization, though not as regards doctrine, from the earlier church. This epoch may be regarded as reaching down to about the seventeenth century.
Look at it in the blood-written annals of the Waldensian valleys, against which it launched crusade after crusade, ravaging their soil with fire and sword, and ceasing its rage only when nothing remained but the crimson stains of its fearful cruelty.
Still the marked deference to authority, the succession of the ministers elected by their predecessors from time to time, the orderly administration of the sacraments, the use of the creeds and of a liturgy, the entire absence of any protest against the orders of the ministry customary in the early church, while so much is so pointedly said respecting corruptions of doctrine, clearly sustain the inference that the Waldensian Church adapted herself to the form of organization adopted by the reformed churches of the continent not from choice, but from such a concurrence of circumstances as completely vindicates her from any wilful departure from the traditions of her earlier history.
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