Voivode

“ The Vaudois," says he, in another place, "are so called from their residence among the valleys and fastnesses of the Alps, and may well be considered as the remains of the purest primitive Christian church. Nor has it been possible to draw them within the pale of the Roman communion, notwithstanding the horrible persecutions exercised against them. At this time they have churches flourishing, as well in doctrine as in examples of a truly innocent life. I speak particularly of those of the Alpine valleys, of whom some are subjects of the king of France, and others of the Duke of Savoy." ”

“ Before the days of Wickliffe, and other reformers, we can trace the Vaudois by their sufferings; they were branded and burnt as heretics, because they would not conform to the doctrines of men, and the edicts of the Roman pontiffs: their steady adherence to the principles of their own faith, and obedience to the will of their Creator, rendered them instrumental to the reformation, which afterwards took place, and by which, in this country, the pure religion of our ancestors was restored. ”

“ Confined amidst the mountains of Piedmont, adjoining Dauphiné, they have there preserved the Christian doctrine and worship in evangelical purity and simplicity, whilst the most profound darkness covered the rest of Europe. It is from the Apostles or their immediate successors, that they have received the gospel, and from that time their faith has never changed; it is now the same as it was before the reformation. The existence of these few thousand Vaudois is therefore most interesting to all Christian nations. ”

“ Now they had reached the foot of the most gigantic of the Alps, whose heads are hoary with eternal snows, and whose precipitous sides are scored by a few perilous paths by which no traveller can come without danger. The Vaudois had to traverse the forests of the lower grounds, to clamber rocks surmounted with silver snows, hollowed out with dazzling glaciers and torrent waterfalls; they came not into this sublime scenery to admire the works of God, but to shun men and cities, to breathe free air—as did the chamois bounding on the heights above them, or the eagle that soared over their heads. ”

“ Who were these Vaudois—this tiny people, springing from Lyons in the twelfth century, and settled among the valleys of the Alps of Piedmont—this scanty, timid herd of mountain folk, for whose destruction the Inquisition was invented? They were, indeed, a remnant, pursued with fire and sword from their earliest days; burned alive in the twelfth century; hacked to death in the thirteenth; suffocated by hundreds under Francis I.; roasted slowly, tortured, hurled like stones down the mountains, slaughtered in every diabolic fashion through the whole diabolic seventeenth century ”

“ Inaction and waiting were the hardest of trials to this girl, child of the mountain as she was.
Patience, Rénée! The time for doing will come. The blood of heroes does not flow uselessly in your young veins; ‘to do’ comes by nature to hearts like yours; ‘to wait’ is a lesson taught by care Divine.
Some stray reports penetrated even to the far recesses of this valley, the most southern of all the Vaudois dwelling-places. Some wandering folk would come from Vigne or Villaro, outcasts like themselves, whom they might question. ”

“ An English monk, quoted by Boxhornius, also gives an example of the purity of Vaudois manners, in the answer of a young woman to the solicitations of her lover; "God forbid, O young man, that I should love thee so much as to become eternally miserable for the gratification of thy wishes."
This admirable purity is still respected in the valleys, and, notwithstanding the corruption of the age, we must look through a long series of years to find one or two females who have not observed it. Those who have fallen are become the objects of universal contempt. ”

“ This word Vaudois, which they first acquired from their geographical situation, they have preserved as a token of their religion in all countries, as the Vaudois of Provence, and of Bohemia, and the Walloons of the Low Countries. Since the Reformation the names of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Reformed, have served to distinguish all those who rejected the papal doctrines, and the inhabitants of our valleys, the only people who have never been affected by these opinions, have alone retained their original name of Vaudois. ”

“ Like the Quakers, the Vaudois were a quiet, even a timid people. They did not seek the notice or the glory of the world. The life they loved the best was that of their lonely Alpine valleys, the simple days of shepherding among the fairy-haunted hills, the evenings when the head of every house read, in his own dialect, the Bible to his assembled children; the bursting of the flowers in spring (flowers which the Fantines, the Vaudois fairies, watch and water every day until they blow) ; the long days out on the hills in summer, when the cattle are led to the upper meadows ”

“ O child, thou hast lost much, and even yet more may be asked of thee—home and dear ones are gone; food, raiment, life itself may be wrenched away—but, Rénée, do not give up thy faith!—thy faith in the rest that remaineth for the Vaudois—thy faith in thy Saviour, who loveth even thee and me!’
The girl was weeping. Not the burning tears of a passionate despair, but the blessed drops that ease the heart from whence they flow. Into her soul there came some faint fair imagining of the meaning of it all—this trial and torture, this desolation and weariness of waiting. ”

“ 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." [2] 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, and heirs of the primitive Church, preserved in these valleys secure from the alterations introduced successively by the Roman Catholics into the evangelical faith." ”

“ I have only to cast a glance back upon our good ancestors, when our barbes studied the Bible alone, to be confirmed in my opinion. Is there now among the nations regarded as the most enlightened, any example of a society, which has attained to such a degree of perfection? Surely, if the answer is in the negative, we must not deny the source of the superiority of the ancient Vaudois over other nations, and even over the Vaudois of the present day. It is true that the studies of our young divines have not always been so simple. ”

“ A thick mist having risen up from the valley, the Vaudois set out, late at night, under the guidance of Captain Poulat, a native of the district, who well knew the paths in the mountains. They climbed up on to the heights above, over icy slopes, passing across gaping crevices and along almost perpendicular rocks, admitting of their passage only in single file, sometimes dragging themselves along on their bellies, clinging to the rocks or to the tufts of grass, occasionally resting and praying, but never despairing. ”

“ Storms of cruelty and the bitterness of superstition had swept the valleys at various times, but never a storm so devastating and terrible as this. From Fenestrelle to Rora, from the Pra Pass to the plains of Piedmont, fire and sword had driven forth the remnant of the Vaudois. Hundreds had fallen, fighting for their faith and for their homes; hundreds had perished under the white pall of the winter snows ”

“ The pope, Innocent XII., tried to invalidate the decree, but the Senate of Turin confirmed the edict of their sovereign, and prohibited the bull of the pope.
So, all the prospect seemed fair, and the Vaudois, so long and cruelly persecuted, might hope for an era of prosperity; for the time and means not only to cultivate their desolated vineyards, to lead their flocks again to pasture on their mountain slopes, and rebuild their thatched homesteads, but also to restore the pure worship of their own and their fathers' God. ”

“ THE ROCK OF BALSILLE.
they must die on the threshold of their own land, like rats caught in a trap. There was no time for much calculation. Arnaud drew his men together, and briefly told them what they must do.
‘Beyond the pass is the vale of Luserna, Angrogna, and the homes we love. The pass is held by two, perhaps three, or even four hundred troops. We must force it, or die. God, who hath helped thus far, will not forsake us now. Ask His aid, Vaudois, not with your lips only, but with your lifted hearts. ”

“ Some rumours of what was happening in the great centres of life, in Paris, and Vienna, and Turin, penetrated as far as Luserna, and echoes reached the friendly cottage on the Casina road, and finally were heard by Madeleine.
Savoy was stripped of troops; the duke had need of all his soldiers in Piedmont; the King of France was fighting with the emperor and the Dutch; and the Vaudois were massed in the cantons of Switzerland, looking with longing eyes at the hill-ranges of their native land. ”

“ The celebrated Peter Valdo, a rich inhabitant of Lyons, openly professed the Vaudois doctrine in 1175. He abandoned all his possessions, gave himself up entirely to the promulgation of the gospel, had the bible translated into the vulgar tongue, and instructed the people publicly in the streets, commencing with the thesis, that we must obey God rather than man. He refused submission to the Pope and his bishops; exposed the scandalous lives of the monks; and refuted the doctrine of the mass, purgatory, adoration of images, and prayers for the dead. ”

“ And over and over the tale was repeated how the enemy broke and fled, leaving behind them provision, ammunition, and baggage; a welcome store for the men who came empty and poor in all things save belief in their cause and faith in their God.
Before the sun set the Savoy guard were fugitives on the mountain side, and the Vaudois stood shoulder to shoulder on the Col di St. Guliano, gazing down on the Luserna Valley, the very heart of their fatherland, the goal of their dearest hopes. ”

“ Indeed we have the fullest evidence that the Vaudois preserved the purity of their faith during the ninth and tenth centuries. To prove this fact, it will be sufficient to give a single quotation from the missionary Marco Aurelio Rorenco, Grand Prior of St. Roch, at Turin, whose work is entitled Narratione delle Intro-duzione delle heresie nelle valli de Piemonte, Turin, 1632.* Speaking of the doctrine of Claude, which this author is pleased to call heresy, he says—"This doctrine continued in the valleys all the ninth and tenth centuries;" ”

“ He who shrinks from this test bears it not, is not a Christian. "He is nothing," to use the words of the Apostle.
It is upon these principles that I beg all that I have advanced in the history of the Vaudois may be judged. If I have expressed myself warmly against their enemies, it is only when they have violated the first duties of Christianity; then I neither wish or ought to spare them, for truth, in the judgment of an honest man, is one and immutable. He ought to purchase it, to use the words of the gospel, to publish and defend it, at the price of all he has in the world. ”

“ Let it be remembered that it is a Vaudois who speaks, a Vaudois, who, like his countrymen, absolutely recognizes no other religion than that of Christianity, and who believes that the unhappy distinctions of Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Calvinists, &c. &c., have done a thousand times more harm to the cause of the gospel, than all the manouvres of the wicked and unbelieving. ”

“ In the eleventh century, Lambertus, a Catholic and friend of Gregory VII. writes thus: "The court of Rome has so completely stifled all charity and Christian simplicity, that almost all good and just men believe that the reign of Antichrist, of which St. John speaks, is already commenced." John the Fifth, who reigned before this period, has been called by cotemporary writers, the most wicked of men. In these unhappy times the Vaudois did not venture to preach any where but in the woods and highest mountains, except in their most remote villages, such as Macel and Pral, &c. ”

“ No other country could be ‘home’ to them. They must return, and lift again—if such were God’s good will—the voice of praise and prayer from the glens and the hills which now lay desolate.
Men with the same anxiety in their hearts as Gaspard had might be reckoned by the score. There was scarcely a Vaudois who would not have willingly died rather than have surrendered the hope of getting home to the valleys, somehow, some day. ”

“ If ever a people fairly established their right to live in their own country, and to worship God after their own methods, the Vaudois had surely done so. They had held conscientiously and consistently to their religion for nearly five hundred years, during which they laboured under many disabilities and suffered much persecution. But the successive Dukes of Savoy were no better satisfied with them as subjects than before. They could not brook that any part of their people should be of a different form of religion from that professed by themselves ”

“ Still such was the spirit engendered by popish fanaticism, that a most frightful conspiracy to murder the defenceless Vaudois women and children of San Giovanni and La Torre, while their fathers and brothers were all away guarding the frontiers, was concocted. Happily for the credit of Christianity and humanity it was discovered and revealed in time by two members of the Romish faith, who were too honourable to sanction such a scheme. These gentlemen, Brianza, priest of Lucerna, and Captain [Pg 93] Odetti, gave notice to the Vaudois. Messengers were at once despatched to the mountains. ”