Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/431

Rh Italy contains within herself to convert us to a right evangelical disposition?”

Convert Italy to the gospel! Ah! Before that, the Protestant church, including that of the Waldenses, must become itself more evangelical. The bitter contentions which have long existed between some of the teachers of the valleys, the representatives on the one side of staunch orthodoxy, and on the other of too latitudinarian a rationalism—contentions, which every fully vitalized church must, to a certain degree, pass through—very clearly shows the necessity which exists of another new form of creed or formula of doctrine, than that which was drawn up more than three hundred years ago, shows,—before every thing else, the necessity of a deeper consciousness even of the signification and purport of a creed.

It also pleases me, that whilst most of the thinking people of the valleys take part either for or against the combatants—the latest cause of strife being the exclusion by the Synod of a young candidate from the priest's office, because he could not in every particular swear to the accepted formulary of faith,—Louise Appia, her brother, and some of the Barbes, withdrew themselves from the contest, do not even talk about it, but continue alone, by word and deed, to labor for God's kingdom. With these laborers it is that M. Meille joins himself in his beautiful, evangelical preaching, in his instruction of children, and in the religious periodical La Buona Novella, of which he is the editor, and which has now taken the place of the former newspaper, L'Echo des Vallées. I know more than one Catholic, who has been brought over