Page:The Waldensian Church in the valleys of Piedmont.djvu/30

 arrangement; and the better to secure the confidence of our readers, we will explain to them that our studies were carried out under such favourable circumstances as procured us not only access to the best authors and MSS., but a personal acquaintance with the country and its inhabitants. In short, like the "busy bee," we have felt it to be our bounden duty, as it was our chief delight, to hasten abroad in the early morning and to work diligently through the long summer day; and having thus collected our store, like her to spare neither time nor effort in moulding it into symmetry and usefulness.

There are two strongly contested opinions respecting the antiquity and derivation of this Church in the Wilderness. It is maintained on one side, that she has preserved her apostolic descent, intact and separate, from the earliest age of Christianity to the present time, without any mixture with other churches, and in total exemption from the errors which have clouded the faith of her Christian sisters. On this side we have the opinion of many eminent writers on prophecy, who point out the Vaudois church as the Western Witness; and also the unwilling testimony of several Roman Catholic authors, who record the tradition that the "heresy," as they term it, "existed in these valleys from all antiquity." The Vaudois themselves maintained, in all their appeals made at various times to their sovereigns, that the religion they followed had been preserved from father to son, and from generation to generation, "from all time, and from time immemorial." Most of their historians support the same opinion. "The Vaudois of the Alps," writes one of the latest, "are, according to our belief, the primitive Christians,