Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/393

Rh which, they replied, “Death rather than the mass!” On this a bloody persecution commenced against them. “Wherefore?” inquired the Waldenses; “we merely follow the usages and laws which we have inherited from our fathers since the time of the Apostles!” The reply to this was imprisonment, and the most cruel executions. These were carried on with such fury in Calabria, that the flourishing congregation there was soon extirpated.

They who were saved from the massacre, fled to the mountains of the Waldenses, within which the whole church of the Waldenses was soon confined. But in nearly every succeeding century, they were visited even here by the persecutions of the Roman Catholic church, and by its hired servants, soldiers athirst for blood and plunder. History has no scenes more cruel, neither has it any more heroic than those which occurred, and which again and again were repeated in these valleys. There is not here a single rock or river which has not been dyed with the blood of martyrs. But they suffered cheerfully, heroically; they encouraged each other to die rather than to swerve from their own and their fathers' faith. I will give, from many individual traits, merely the following: One man, during the fifteenth century, was offered either within three days to accept the Romish doctrine, or to be burned alive. He was in prison when that sentence was passed, and his wife then desired to speak with him “as she had something of importance to his best interests to say to him.” They, not doubting but that she would endeavor to persuade him to