p. 219 | The Vaudois

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 2, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 14.

The Vaudois.

THREE valleys of singular interest open from the higher Alps into the rich plains of Piedmont below. Through each a rapid stream or mountain torrent, fed by perpetual snows and glaciers, rushes with a varying current, and mingles at length with the stately Po. Two of the vales, Lucerna and Perouse, widen as they descend from the crags above, and melt into the general softness of the Italian scene. Lucerna, the most fertile, the most beautiful, possesses unrivaled charms. Its thick and almost perpetual foliage, its groves of mulberry trees, its woods of chestnut, the waving fields of wheat, its vineyards climbing up the mountain-side, its temperate air, its countless hamlets, its innocent and happy people, seem to rest in perfect peace beneath the shelter of the encircling Alps.

It would indeed be a paradise, exclaimed the historian Leger, if it were not so near the Jesuits at Turin. San Martino, the third valley, is happily less beautiful. It is a wild ravine pierced by a fierce mountain torrent—the Germanasca. On each side of the stream the huge Alps shoot upward, and ranges of inaccessible cliffs and crags frown over the narrow vale beneath. Its climate is severe, its people hardy. In the upper part of the valley winter is almost perpetual. The snow lies for eight or nine months on the ground. The crops are scanty, the herbage faint and rare. The shrill cry of the marmot, the shriek of the eagle, alone disturb the silence of the Vaudois Sabbath; and in the clear, bright air the graceful chamois is seen leaping from peak to peak of his mountain pastures.

San Martino has formed for ages the citadel of the Vaudois, the last refuge of religious freedom. Often, when the papal troops had swept over its sister valleys, filling their fairer scenery with bloodshed and desolation, the brave people of the interior vale defied the invaders. The persecutors turned in alarm from the narrow pass where every crag concealed a marksman; where huge stones were rolled upon their heads from the heights above; where every cave and rock upon the mountain-side was tenanted by a fearless garrison. Here, within the borders of Italy itself, the popes have never been able, except for one unhappy interval, to enforce their authority. Here no mass has been said, no images adored, no papal rites administered by the native Vaudois. It was here that Henry Arnaud, the hero of the valleys, redeemed his country from the tyranny of the Jesuits and Rome; and here a Christian church, founded perhaps in the apostolic age, has survived the persecutions of a thousand years.

The territory of the Vaudois embraces scarcely sixteen square miles. The three valleys can never have contained a population of more than twenty thousand. In every age the manners of the people have been the same. They are tall, graceful, vigorous, a mountain race accustomed to labor or to hunt the chamois in his native crags. The women are fair and spotless; their rude but plaintive hymns are often heard resounding from the chestnut groves; their native refinement softens the apparent harshness of their frugal lives. Over the whole population of the Vaudois valleys has ever rested the charm of a spotless purity. Their fair and tranquil countenances speak only frankness and simplicity; their lives are passed in deeds of charity, in honest labors, and in unvarying self-respect. The vices and the follies, the luxury and the crime, that have swept over Europe never invaded the happy valleys, unless carried thither by the papal troops.

No pride, no avarice, no fierce resentment, disturbs the peaceful Vaudois; no profanity, no crime, is heard of in this singular community. To wait upon the sick, to aid the stranger, are eagerly contended for as a privilege; compassion, even for their enemies, is the crowning excellence of this generous race. When their persecutor, Victor Amadeus II., was driven from Turin by the French, he took refuge in the valleys he had desolated, in the cottage of a Vaudois peasant. Here he lived in perfect security. The peasant might have filled his house with gold by betraying his guest; he refused; the duke escaped, and rewarded his preserver with characteristic parsimony. In the French wars of the last century, when Suwarrow was victorious among the Alps, three hundred wounded Frenchmen took shelter in the village of Bobbio. The Vaudois cared for their former persecutors as long as their scanty means allowed, and then, taking the wounded soldiers on their shoulders, carried them over the steep Alpine passes, and brought them safely to their native France.

We may accept, for we cannot refute, the narrative of their early history given by the Vaudois themselves. Soon after the dawn of Christianity, they assert, their ancestors embraced the faith of St. Paul, and practiced the simple rites and usages described by Justin or Tertullian. The Scriptures became their only guide; the same belief, the same sacraments they maintain to-day, they held in the age of Constantine and Sylvester. They relate that, as the Romish church grew in power and pride, their ancestors repelled its assumptions and refused to submit to its authority; that when, in the ninth century, the use of images was enforced by superstitious popes, they, at least, never consented to become idolaters; that they never worshiped the virgin, nor bowed at an idolatrous mass.

When, in the eleventh century, Rome asserted its supremacy over kings and princes, the Vaudois were its bitterest foes. The three valleys formed the theological school of Europe. The Vaudois missionaries traveled into Hungary and Bohemia, France, England, even Scotland, and aroused the people to a sense of the fearful corruption of the church. They pointed to Rome as the antichrist, the center of every abomination. They taught, in the place of the Romish innovations, the pure faith of the apostolic age. Lollard, who led the way to the reforms of Wycliffe, was a preacher from the valleys; the Albigenses of Provence, in the twelfth century, were the fruits of the Vaudois missions; Germany and Bohemia were reformed by the teachers of Piedmont; Huss and Jerome did little more than proclaim the Vaudois faith; and Luther and Calvin were only the necessary offspring of the apostolic churches of the Alps.

The early pastors of the Vaudois were called barbes; and in a deep recess among the mountains, hidden from the persecutor's eye, a cave is shown where in the middle ages a throng of scholars came from different parts of Europe to study the literature of the valleys. The barbes were well qualified to teach a purer faith than that of Rome; a Vaudois poem, written about 1100, called the "Noble Lesson," still exists, and inculcates a pure morality and an apostolic creed; a catechism of the twelfth century has also been preserved; its doctrines are those of modern Protestantism. The Vaudois church had no bishop; its head was an elder, majorales, who was only a presiding officer over the younger barbes. But in that idyllic church no ambition and no strife arose, and each pastor strove only to excel his fellows in humility and in charitable deeds.—Historical Studies.