Now, since the Romanists are constrained to acknowledge their own ignorance in regard to the origin of the two Churches; and since those among them, who had the best means of information, will only venture to say, that these heretical communities had, in the twelfth century, already existed from a period far beyond the memory of man: I see not what more unexceptionable testimony we can resort to, than that of the two ancient Churches themselves.

They, then, constantly asserted, we are told, from the twelfth century down to the sixteenth, that, when the Emperor Constantine, in the days of Pope Sylvester, corrupted the Church by the magnitude of his donations, one of the companions of that prelate, anticipating the apostasy of which he then beheld the commencement, withdrew himself from the communion of the Roman Pontiff. He was joined by several persons, who held the same primitive sentiments as himself, and who wished to preserve unspotted the purity of the early Church. These pious men formed henceforth a separate society, out of which sprang the two Churches of the Vallenses in Piedmont and of the Albigenses in France. In a state of voluntary poverty and depression, their object was to preserve the simplicity of the apostolic faith: and the constant doctrine, both of themselves and of their successors, was; that the true Church of Christ no longer existed in the persons of Pope Sylvester and his adherents, but that from his time or from the earlier part of the fourth century the genuine

succession of the sincere Church (against which Christ had promised that the gates of hell should never prevail) had been preserved only among themselves'. Agreeably to such an opinion, they

'Their holding this opinion will readily account for the calumny of their enemies, that they maintained, contrary to the promise of Christ, that the Church might altogether fail and

become extinct.

Instead of teaching any such doctrine, they expressly rejected it, with various other tenets falsely ascribed to them, as heretical and damnable. See Acland's Compend. of the Hist. of the Vaud. p. cxix. prefixed to Arnaud's Glorious Recovery.

What they taught was, that Rome had ceased to be the true Church, and that the line of genuine succession was preserved in their own Society. It was on this principle, that they justly refused to style their Church a reformed Church. Other Churches, by the light of Scripture, had found it necessary to retrace their steps and to seek again the old paths: but they, from the very first, had held primitive truth unchanged and uncorrupted.

That their religion is as primitive as their name is venerable, says the celebrated Henri Arnaud, is attested even by their adversaries-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. Pref. to Glorious Recov. p. xiii, xiv.

Precisely the same claim of unbroken and uncorrupted descent from the apostolic age was preferred by the Churches of Piedmont, in their short confession of faith, published on occasion of the bloody massacres, perpetrated among them by the

contended, that the cross, that is to say, the superstitious and idolatrous use of the cross, is the mark of the apocalyptic wild-beast and the abomination standing in the holy place: and they additionally maintained, that Sylvester was the Antichrist, the son of perdition, who is foretold in the Epistles of St. Paul as extolling himself above every thing that is called God1.

In all its grand outlines, I can perceive no reason why we should reject this narrative: for it fully accords, both with the acknowledged fact of the remote antiquity of the Vallenses, and with the invariable habits and sentiments which they ever adopted and expressed. The Romanists themselves confess papalists in the year 1655. At the close of it, they say: We are ready to sign this divine truth with our blood, as our ancestors have done ever since the time of the Apostles, and more especially in the latter ages. Acland's Compend. p. cxvii.

1 Reiner. cont. hæret. c. iv, v. Pilichdorf. cont. Valdens. c. iv. p. 779. Fragment. Pilich. p. 815, 816. Seissel. Tract. adv. Vald. fol. 5, cited by Bossuet. Script. Vetust. apud d'Acher. Spic. vol. xiii. cited by Allix.

"I am aware, that the Bishop of Meaux wishes to treat the narrative as a fable: but I can discover no reason save the very obvious one, that, if true, it at once destroys his favourite argument against the doctrines of Protestantism; namely, that which rests upon the alleged want of an unbroken ecclesiastical succession. Now this succession will have been preserved by the two ancient Churches of the Vallenses and the Albigenses, if, as they themselves invariably maintain, they derived their origin from the Apostles, and if, since the time of Pope Sylvester, they have existed in a regularly organised form, though separated from the corrupt Churches of the Eastern and the Western Patriarchates. See Hist. des Variat. livr. xi. § 124. In the twelfth

the prevalence of the narrative in question, from the twelfth century down to the sixteenth and, as we possess not the slightest proof that it originated in the twelfth century, we shall not easily account for its general and constant admission by the ancient Churches, except on the natural principle that it had been regularly handed down from the very time of their commencement. Hence, in all its grand outlines, I scruple not to receive the narrative now before us. The founder, indeed, of the Vallensic Churches, or rather, to speak more properly, the author of their secession from the now rapidly declining Church-General, may very possibly have never been a companion of Pope Sylvester and I think it indisputable, that the allegation of his bearing the name of Leon, which in the sixteenth century is said to have formed a part of the narrative, is a modern figment, superadded by the vulgar for the evident purpose of accounting for the appellation of Leonists, which in the time of Reinarius was borne by the united Vallenses and Albigenses, and which has clearly been borrowed from the town of Lyons. But these matters are mere supplemental excrescences, which, without affecting the general purport of the narrative, may be admitted or rejected at pleasure. The naked unadorned fact, which I am willing, in short, to receive, is this.

and thirteenth centuries it was confessed, that they had even then existed from a period far beyond the memory of man: and they themselves declare, that they became a separate society in the earlier half of the fourth century.

In the time of Pope Sylvester, when an already declining Church was rendered yet more corrupt by the donations of the first Christian Emperor Constantine, the simple and uncontaminated inhabitants of the Alpine valleys of Dauphiny and Piedmont, offended by the innovating superstition of the age, and disgusted (as the narrative states) at the avaricious secularity of Sylvester, quietly and unobservedly, in their mountain fastnesses, withdrew themselves from the communion of a Church, which they deemed apostatic, and in the already gorgeous head of which they recognised the predicted features of St. Paul's man of sin.

This, from the evidence before me, I take to have been the naked fact: and thus were these two Churches prepared for their office of witnessing against corrupt superstition, from the completion of the Apostasy in the year 6041.

'The fact, for which I contend, perfectly accords with the general character of mountaineers.

When, in the eighth century, the Roman world had fallen into the miserable superstition of image-worship, the person, who strenuously opposed this odious and unscriptural corruption, was the Emperor Leo Isauricus. In his unsophisticated native mountains, the practice had as yet obtained no footing and Leo, at Constantinople, was shocked and surprised to find a system of idolatry, so utterly unlike that primitive and simple form of Christianity to which he and his fathers had been accustomed.

Such were the natural feelings of this Iconoclastic sovereign. Now, unless I greatly mistake, the unchanging character of the secluded Alpine mountaineers, is faithfully reflected in the simi