Page:The Waldensian Church in the valleys of Piedmont.djvu/32

 opposed to the pretensions and errors of Rome, as far as we can judge from documents that can be traced up to the fourth century at least. If, therefore, we find truth and evangelical holiness among the Waldenses of Piedmont, when other professors of the gospel in different ages and places went wrong, in the fourth century for example, and again in the ninth and eleventh, in the twelfth and thirteenth, and in the sixteenth century - if we can take epochs at random, and still find vestiges of the pure gospel at the foot of the Cottian Alps, long before the Reformation - we may conclude that the gospel was transmitted, and preserved among them, from primitive times. It is surely more probable that the "men of the valleys," shepherds and husbandmen, should retain the truth, as it was first delivered to them, than that they should be able to discover it amidst the darkness of the twelfth century, when all Christendom was departing farther and farther from the light, under the false teaching of subtle schoolmen, and ambitious and licentious hierarchs.

"At such a remote period did our Piedmontese valleys exhibit the stamp of early evangelization."

We need not multiply authorities, or nothing would be more easy; but we cannot refrain from adding that of one who will not be accused of partiality towards any form of Christianity: "It is an extraordinary fact," observes Voltaire, after affirming the antiquity of the Vaudois Church as the remains of the first Christians of Gaul, "that these men, almost unknown to the rest of the world, should constantly have persevered, from time immemorial, in usages which have been changed everywhere else."