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Updated: June 22, 2025
But this cannot be always had." "The disease is continual," answered Campion; "ergo the remedy must be continual." Then he left the a priori ground and entered theirs. "To whom should I have gone," he cried, "before Luther's time? What prelates should I have made my complaint unto in those days? Where was your Church nine hundred years ago? Whose were John Huss, Jerome of Prague, the Waldenses?
The Romish church itself is, therefore, represented as participating in the work of martyrdom. Does this divine prediction agree with the facts of history? It is altogether impossible to compute correctly the number of those who were in different ways put to death for opposing the corruption of the Church of Rome. A million Waldenses perished in France.
Thus an invisible omnipotent arm was ever extended over the Vaudois and their land, delivering them miraculously in times of danger, and preserving them as a peculiar people, that by their instrumentality Jehovah might accomplish his designs of mercy towards the world. Nor were the Waldenses content simply to maintain their faith.
In spite of persecution, the Waldenses still survived to propagate their declaration that the Roman Church, since Constantine, had degenerated from its purity and sanctity; to protest against the sale of indulgences, which they said had nearly abolished prayer, fasting, alms; to affirm that it was utterly useless to pray for the souls of the dead, since they must already have gone either to heaven or hell.
But the Waldenses were a primitive and simple people; they had neither king nor leader; their only sovereign was Jehovah; their only guides were their Barbes. The struggle under the Maccabees was a noble one; but it attained not the grandeur of that of the Vaudois. It was short in comparison; nor do its single exploits, brave as they were, rise to the same surpassing pitch of heroism.
Some think they had held them for centuries; some think they had learned them recently from the Taborites. If scholars insist on this latter view, we are forced back on the further question: Where did the Taborites get their advanced opinions? If the Taborites taught the Waldenses, who taught the Taborites? We do not know.
In the Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters Waldenses, Lollards, Hussites had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom.
Will she now falter and draw back, she that never before feared enemy or spared foe? Will that Church that quenched in blood the Protestantism of the Waldenses, that put down the Reformation in France by one terrible blow, that by the help of dungeons and racks banished the light from Italy and Spain, will that Church, we ask, spare the Protestantism of Britain?
At Coligny's suggestion, Charles wrote to the Duke of Savoy interceding for the Waldenses, who were being persecuted cruelly for having assisted the Huguenots of France. So angered were the Guises, by the favour with which the king treated the Admiral, that they retired from court; and the king was thus left entirely to the influence of Montmorency and Coligny.
After enquiring as to the geographical position of the Waldensian valleys, the next most frequent questions which arise are: Who are the Waldenses? how long have they been in the valleys of Piedmont? what circumstances led to their taking up their abode there? and what has given to their history that peculiar characteristic which makes every detail both of their past and present so intensely interesting to all the lovers of piety and patriotism wherever the story of their high-souled courage or their long-enduring faith has reached?
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