The Popes and the Vaudois.
FROM Constantine to Hildebrand, from the third to the eleventh century, the Vaudois, we may trust, cultivated their valleys in peace. The Roman Church, engaged in its strife with emperors and kings, overlooked or despised the teachers of the mountains. In the contest of giants, the modest shepherds were forgotten. Yet they aimed with almost fatal effect the rustic sling of truth against the Roman Philistine. Nothing is more plain than that from the twelfth to the fifteenth century the people of Europe were nearly united in opposition to the Roman See. The popes had never yet been able to reduce to subjection the larger portion of the Christian church; it was only over kings and princes that their victories had been achieved. Every country in Europe swarmed with dissidents, who repelled as antichrist, the bishop of Rome, who pointed with horror and disgust to the vices and the crimes of the Italian prelates and the encroaching monks. In Languedoc and Provence, the home of the troubadour and of mediæval civilization, the Roman priests were pursued to the altars with shouts of derision. Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany were filled with various sects of primitive Christians, who had never learned to worship graven images, or to bow before glittering madonnas. Spain, England, Scotland, are said by the Vaudois traditions to have retained an early Christianity. In the fourteenth century it is certain that nearly half England accepted the faith of Lollard and Wycliffe. The Romish writers of the thirteenth century abound in treatises against heretics; the fable of a united Christendom, obeying with devoted faith a pope at Rome, had no credence in the period to which it is commonly assigned; and from the reign of Innocent III. to the council of Constance (1200-1414) the Roman church was engaged in a constant and often doubtful contest with the widely diffused fragments of apostolic Christianity. The popes had succeeded in subjecting kings and emperors; they now employed them in crushing the people. Innocent III. excited Philip of France to a fierce crusade against the Albigenses of the South; amidst a general massacre of men, women, and children, the gentle sect sunk, never to appear again. Dominic invented, or enlarged, the inquisition; and soon in every land the spectacle of blazing heretics and tortured saints delighted the eyes of the Romish clergy. Over the rebellious kings the popes had held the menace of interdict, excommunication, deposition; to the people they offered only submission or death. The inquisition was their remedy for the apostolic heresies of Germany, England, Spain—a simple cure for dissent or reform. It seemed effectual. The Albigenses were perfectly extirpated. In the cities of Italy the Waldenses ceased to be known. Lollardism concealed itself in England; the Scriptural Christians of every land who refused to worship images or adore the virgin disappeared from sight; the supremacy of Rome was assured over all Western Europe. Yet one blot remained on the fair fame of the seemingly united Christendom. Within the limits of Italy itself a people existed to whom the mass was still a vain idolatry, the real presence a papal fable; who had resisted with vigor every innovation, and whose simple rites and ancient faith were older than the papacy itself. What waves of persecution may have surged over the Vaudois valleys in earlier ages we do not know, they seem soon to have become familiar with the cruelty of Rome; but in the fifteenth century the popes and the inquisitors turned their malignant eyes upon the simple Piedmontese, and prepared to exterminate with fire and sword the Alpine church. And now began a war of four centuries, the most remarkable in the annals of Europe. On the one side stood the people of the valleys—poor, humble, few. Driven to resistance by their pitiless foes, they took up arms with reluctance; they fought only for safety; they wept over the fallen. Yet it soon appeared that every one of the simple mountaineers was a hero; that he could meet toil, famine, danger, death, with a serene breast in defense of his loved ones and his faith; that his vigorous arm, his well-ordered frame, were more than a match for the mercenary Catholic, the dissolute Savoyard; that he joined to the courage of the soldier the Christian ardor of the martyr; that he was, in fact, invincible. For four centuries a crusade almost incessant went on against the secluded valleys. Often the papal legions, led by the inquisitors, swept over the gentle landscape of Lucerna, and drove the people from the blazing villages to hide in caves on the mountains, and almost browse with the chamois on the wild herbage of the wintry rocks. Often the dukes of Savoy sent well-trained armies of Spanish foot to blast and wither the last trace of Christian civilization in San Martin or Perouse. More than once the best soldiers and the best generals of Mazarin and Louis XIV. hunted the Vaudois in their wildest retreats, massacred them in caves, starved them in the regions of the glaciers, and desolated the valleys from San Jean to the slopes of Guinevert. Yet the unflinching people still refused to give up their faith. Still they repelled the idolatry of the mass; still they mocked at the antichrist of Rome. In the deepest hour of distress, the venerable barbes gathered around them their famine-stricken congregations in some cave or cranny of the Alps, administered their apostolic rites, and preached anew the sermon on the mount. The psalms of David, chanted in the plaintive melodies of the Vaudois, echoed far above the scenes of rapine and carnage of the desolate valleys; the apostolic church lived indestructible, the coronal of some heaven-piercing Alp. The popes, the leaders of the inquisition, the dukes of Savoy, bigoted and cruel, often condescended to flatteries and caresses to win those they could not conquer. They offered large bribes to the poorest mountaineer who would consent to abandon the church of his fathers and betray the haunts of the heretic. Wealth, honors, the favor of his king and of the Romish priests, awaited him who would recant; an easy path of preferment lay open to the young men of the valleys, accustomed only to toil and want; they were tempted as few other men have ever been. Yet the papal bribes were even less successful than the papal arms. A few imbeciles who had lost their moral purity alone yielded to the allurements of gain and pleasure; the great body of the Vaudois youth rejected the offers with disdain. The stately magnanimity of the "Noble Lesson," the simple principles of their ancient catechism, taught them in their plain churches by some learned yet gentle barbe, raised them above those inferior impulses by which the corrupt world beneath them was controlled. No hereditary vices tarnished their fair organizations; no coarse disease impaired their mental and moral vigor. With a wisdom above philosophy, they saw that it was better to live with a calm conscience a frugal life than to revel in ill-gotten gold. They clung to their mountains, their moral purity, and their faith. Generation after generation, fiercely tried, hardly tempted, never wavered in their resolve. The war of four centuries for liberty of conscience, for freedom to worship God, was accepted by the youthful Vaudois as their noblest inheritance. The contest went on with varying success but equal vigor, and ceased only in its final consequences when the triumphant voice of Garibaldi proclaimed Italy forever free. Pope Innocent VIII., a man of rare benevolence, according to the Romish writers, and a devoted lover of Christian union, resolved (1487) to adorn his reign by a complete extinction of the Vaudois heresy. He issued a bull summoning all faithful kings, princes, rulers, to a crusade against the children of the valleys. No heretic was to be spared, his goods, his life, were declared forfeited unless he would consent to attend mass. The pope, or his inquisitor, enumerated in a pastoral letter the crimes of the Vaudois. He charged them with calling the Roman church a church of the evil one; of denouncing the worship of the virgin, the invocation of saints; of asserting with unblushing boldness, that they alone possessed the pure doctrine of the apostles. To Albertus Capitaneus was committed the sacred trust of leading an army into the guilty region, and executing upon its people the sentence of Rome. The Catholics gathered together in great numbers at the appeal of the chief inquisitor; a tumultuous throng of soldiers, brigands, priests, entered the valleys and commenced a general pillage. But they were soon disturbed in their labors by the swift attacks of the Vaudois. The resolute and fearless mountaineers sallied from their caves and ravines and drove the robbers before them. One Christian, armed only with the vigor of innocence, seemed equal to a hundred papists. The crusaders fled, beaten and affrighted from the valleys; the malevolent design of Innocent was never fulfilled; and the Romanists asserted and believed that every Vaudois was a magician, and was guarded by an invisible spell. Yet still the perpetual persecution went on. The papal agents made their way into the lower portions of the valleys, seized the eminent barbes and faithful teachers, and burned them with cruel joy. The Vaudois never knew any respite from real and imminent danger. Ever they must be ready to fly to their mountains and caves; ever their trembling wives and children were exposed to the cruelty and cunning of the envious priests. The sixteenth century opened. The Reformation came, and the chief reformers of France and Germany entered into a friendly correspondence with the barbes and churches of Piedmont. They admitted the purity of their faith, the antiquity of their rites. But the rise of the Reformation served only to deepen the rage of the papists against the children of the valleys. The darkest days of the Vaudois drew near, when their enemies could for a moment boast that the last refuge of Italian heresy had fallen before their arms.—Historical Studies.