NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. CCXLII-JULY, 1870.-VOL. XLI.

HREE valleys of singular interest open from | fect peace beneath the shelter of the encircling

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by Harper and Brothers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

162

HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

seen leaping from peak to peak of his mountain and rewarded his preserver with characteristic pastures.

San Martino has formed for ages the citadel of the Vaudois, the last refuge of religious freedom. Often, when the papal troops had swept over its sister valleys, filling their fairer scenery The with bloodshed and desolation, the brave people of the interior vale defied the invaders. persecutors turned in alarm from the narrow pass where every crag concealed a marksman; where huge stones were rolled upon their heads from the heights above; where every cave and rock upon the mountain-side were tenanted by a fearless garrison. Here, within the borders of Italy itself, the popes have never been able, except for one unhappy interval, to enforce their authority. Here no mass has been said, no images adored, no papal rites administered by the It was here that Henry Arnative Vaudois. naud, the hero of the valleys, redeemed his country from the tyranny of the Jesuits and Rome; and here a Christian church, founded perhaps in the apostolic age, has survived the persecutions of a thousand years.1

2

The territory of the Vaudois embraces scarcely sixteen square miles. The three valleys can never have contained a population of more than twenty thousand. In every age the manners of the people have been the same. They are tall, graceful, vigorous; a mountain race accustomed to labor or to hunt the chamois in his native crags. The women are fair and spotless; their rude but plaintive hymns are often heard resounding from the chestnut groves; their native refinement softens the apparent harshness of their frugal lives. Over the whole population of the Vaudois valleys has ever rested the Their fair and charm of a spotless purity. tranquil countenances speak only frankness and simplicity; their lives are passed in deeds of charity, in honest labors, and in unvarying selfrespect. The vices and the follies, the luxury and the crime that have swept over Europe never invaded the happy valleys, unless carried thither by the papal troops. No pride, no avarice, no fierce resentment disturbs the peaceful Vaudois; no profanity, no crime is heard of in this singular community. To wait upon the sick, to aid the stranger, are eagerly contended for as a privilege; compassion, even for their enemies, is the crowning excellence of the genWhen their persecutor, Victor Amadeus II., was driven from Turin by the French, he took refuge in the valleys he had desolated, in the cottage of a Vaudois peasant. Here he lived in perfect security. The peasant might have filled his house with gold by betraying his guest; he refused; the duke escaped,

erous race.

A work of
1 Muston, i. p. 107. The Israel of the Alps is the
most complete account of the Vaudois.
great learning, research, and enthusiasm.
2 Muston, i. p. 7.

3 The moral vigor of the Vaudois is well attested
for four or five centuries. See J. Bresse, Hist. Vau-
dois, p. 85, an unfinished history. So Authentic De-
tails of the Waldenses, p. 48. Muston, Hist. Vaud., 1.
And see Israel of the Alps.

The

parsimony. In the French wars of the last
century, when Suwarrow was victorious among
the Alps, three hundred wounded Frenchmen
took shelter in the village of Bobbio.
Vaudois cared for their former persecutors as
taking the wounded soldiers on their shoulders,
long as their scanty means allowed, and then.
carried them over the steep Alpine passes and
We may accept, for we can not refute, the
brought them safely to their native France.
Soon after the dawn of
narrative of their early history given by the
Vaudois themselves.1
Christianity, they assert, their ancestors em-
braced the faith of St. Paul, and practiced the
The Scriptures became their only
simple rites and usages described by Justin or
Tertullian.
guide; the same belief, the same sacraments
they maintain to-day, they held in the age of
Constantine and Sylvester. They relate that,
as the Romish church grew in power and pride,
their ancestors repelled its assumptions and re-
the ninth century, the use of images was en-
fused to submit to its authority; that when, in
never consented to become idolaters; that they
forced by superstitious popes, they, at least,
When in the eleventh cen-
never worshiped the Virgin, nor bowed at an
idolatrous mass.
tury Rome asserted its supremacy over kings
and princes, the Vaudois were its bitterest foes.
The three valleys formed the theological school
of Europe. The Vaudois missionaries traveled
into Hungary and Bohemia, France, England,
even Scotland, and aroused the people to a sense
of the fearful corruption of the church. They
They taught, in the
pointed to Rome as the antichrist, the centre
of every abomination.
place of the Romish innovations, the pure faith
Lollard, who led the way
of the apostolic age.
to the reforms of Wycliffe, was a preacher from
the valleys; the Albigenses of Provence, in the
twelfth century, were the fruits of the Vaudois
missions; Germany and Bohemia were reform-
rome did little more than proclaim the Vaudois
ed by the teachers of Piedmont; Huss and Je-
faith; and Luther and Calvin were only the
necessary offspring of the apostolic churches of
the Alps.

The early pastors of the Vaudois were called
barbes (uncle); and in a deep recess among the
mountains, hidden from the persecutor's eye, a
cave is shown where in the Middle Ages a throng
of scholars came from different parts of Europe
to study the literature of the valleys.' The
barbes were well qualified to teach a purer
faith than that of Rome: a Vaudois poem, writ-
ten about 1100, called the "Noble Lesson," still
apostolic creed; a catechism of the twelfth
exists, and inculcates a pure morality and an
1 The Vaudois writers concur in placing their own
origin at a period before Constantine. Leger, i. p. 25
et seq.

2

Peyran, Nouvelles Lettres sur les Vaudois. Lett. 3 Bresse, Hist. Vaudois. ii. p. 26, La religion des Vaudois s'est etendue presque mi les Italiens. dans tous les endroits de Europe; non seulement par

4 Raynouard, Mon. Langue Romane, ii. p. 37.

THE VALLEYS OF THE VAUDOIS.

TOWNS.-1. Lucernette; 2. Lucerns; 3. La Tour; 4. Saint John.

VALLEYS.-5. Valley of Salabial or Lucernette, 6. Valley of Rora; 7 Valley of Lucerna or Pelis; 8. Valley of Angrogna (the lower part opening into the Valley of Lucerna); 9. Basin of Saint John.

MOUNTAINS.-10. Mt. Friouland; 11. Mt. Brouard; 19. Mt. Palavas; 13. Le Cournaout; 14. Mt. Vaudalin; 15. Peak of Cella Veilla; 16. Cote Roussine; 17. Mountains of La Vachere; 18. Les Sonnaillettes; 19. Costiere of Saint John.

century has also been preserved; its doctrines | vented, or enlarged, the Inquisition; and soon are those of modern Protestantism. The Vau- in every land the spectacle of blazing heretics dois church had no bishop;' its head was an elder, majorales, who was only a presiding officer over the younger barbes. But in that idyl lic church no ambition and no strife arose, and each pastor strove only to excel his fellows in humility and in charitable deeds.

see.

2

Yet one blot remained on the fair fame of the seemingly united Christendom. Within the limits of Italy itself a people existed to whom the mass was still a vain idolatry, the real presence a papal fable; who had resisted with vigor every innovation, and whose simple rites and ancient faith were older than the papacy itself. What waves of persecution may have surged over the Vaudois valleys in earlier ages we do not know; they seem soon to have become familiar with the cruelty of Rome; but in the fifteenth century the popes and the inquisitors turned their malignant eyes upon the simple Piedmontese, and prepared to exterminate with fire and sword the Alpine church.

and tortured saints delighted the eyes of the Romish clergy.' Over the rebellious kings the popes had held the menace of interdict, excommunication, deposition; .to the people they offered only submission or death. The Inquisition was their remedy for the apostolic heresies From Constantine to Hildebrand, from the of Germany, England, Spain-a simple cure for third to the eleventh century, the Vaudois, we dissent or reform. It seemed effectual. The may trust, cultivated their valleys in peace. Albigenses were perfectly extirpated. In the The Roman church, engaged in its strife with cities of Italy the Waldenses ceased to be known. emperors and kings, overlooked or despised the Lollardism concealed itself in England; the teachers of the mountains. In the contest of scriptural Christians of every land who refused giants the modest shepherds were forgotten. to worship images or adore the Virgin disapYet they aimed with almost fatal effect the rus-peared from sight; the supremacy of Rome tic sling of truth against the Roman Philistine. was assured over all Western Europe. Nothing is more plain than that from the twelfth to the fifteenth century the people of Europe were nearly united in opposition to the Roman The popes had never yet been able to reduce to subjection the larger portion of the Christian church; it was only over kings and princes that their victories had been achieved. Every country in Europe swarmed with dissidents, who repelled as antichrist the bishop of Rome; who pointed with horror and disgust to the vices and the crimes of the Italian prelates and the encroaching monks. In Languedoc and Provence, the home of the troubadour and of medieval civilization, the Roman priests were pursued to the altars with shouts of derision. Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany were filled with various sects of primitive Christians, who had never learned to worship graven images, or to bow before glittering Madonnas. Spain, Eugland, Scotland, are said by the Vaudois traditions to have retained an early Christianity. In the fourteenth century it is certain that nearly half England accepted the faith of Lollard and Wycliffe. The Romish writers of the thirteenth century abound in treatises against heretics; the fable of a united Christendom, obeying with devoted faith a pope at Rome, had no credence in the period to which it is commonly assigned; and from the reign of Innocent III. to the Council of Constance (1200-1414) the Roman church was engaged in a constant and often doubtful contest with the widely-diffused fragments of apostolic Christianity."

On

And now began a war of four centuries, the most remarkable in the annals of Europe. the one side stood the people of the valleyspoor, humble, few. Driven to resistance by their pitiless foes, they took up arms with reluctance; they fought only for safety; they wept over the fallen.3 Yet it soon appeared that every one of the simple mountaineers was a hero; that he could meet toil, famine, danger, death with a serene breast in defense of his loved ones and his faith; that his vigorous arm, his well-ordered frame, were more than a match for the mercenary Catholic, the dissolute Savoyard; that he joined to the courage of the soldier the Christian ardor of the martyr; that he was, in fact, invincible. For four centuries a crusade almost incessant went on against the secluded valleys. Often the papal legions, led by the inquisitors, swept over the gentle landscape of Lucerna, and drove the people from the blazing villages to hide in caves on the mountains, and almost browse with the chamois on the wild herbage of the wintry rocks. Often the dukes of Savoy sent well-trained armies of Spanish foot to blast and wither the last trace of Christian civilization in San Martin or Perouse. More than once the best soldiers and the best generals of Mazarin and Louis XIV.

1 Milman, Lat. Christ., iv. 266.

2 Janus, Pope and Council, cap. xvi., has a brief and careful review of the rigor of the Inquisition from 1200 to 1500; the popes named all the inquisitors. See p. 194-196.

3 Gilly, Excursion, has various legends of the early Perrin and Leger are the authorities.

wars.

Mount. The psalms of David, chanted in the plaintive melodies of the Vaudois, echoed far above the scenes of rapine and carnage of the desolate valleys; the apostolic church lived indestructible, the coronal of some heaven-piercing Alp.

hunted the Vaudois in their wildest retreats, | rites, and preached anew the Sermon on the massacred them in caves, starved them in the region of the glaciers, and desolated the valleys from San Jean to the slopes of Guinevert. Yet the unflinching people still refused to give up their faith. Still they repelled the idolatry of the mass; still they mocked at the antichrist of Rome. In the deepest hour of distress the The popes, the leaders of the Inquisition, the venerable barbes' gathered around them their dukes of Savoy, bigoted and cruel, often condefamine-stricken congregations in some cave or scended to flatteries and caresses to win those cranny of the Alps, administered their apostolic they could not conquer; they offered large 1 Barbe means uncle. Leger, p. 205. C'estoit l'ap-bribes to the poorest mountaineer who would peller oncle. A name always honorable in the south consent to abandon the church of his fathers of France. and betray the haunts of the heretic. Wealth,