The Vaudois in Time of Peace.
FROM this time (1561) for nearly a century no new crusade was preached against the Vaudois. Their native sovereigns were satisfied with lesser persecutions. The barbes, as usual, were often burned; the valleys were oppressed with a cruel taxation; the earnings of the honest people were torn from them to maintain dissolute princes and indolent priests. In 1596, Charles Emanuel ordered all the Vaudois, under pain of death or exile, to attend the preaching of the Jesuits, and the valleys were filled with the disciples of Loyola, who strove to corrupt or terrify the youth of the early church. To every convert was offered an exemption from taxation, and various favors and emoluments were heaped upon him who would attend mass. Yet the restless Jesuits were altogether unsuccessful. Their preaching and their bribes were equally contemned by the happy mountaineers; the church still lived unspotted from the world. During this period of tolerable suffering, the valleys once more glowed with the products of a careful industry; they were the homes of purity and thrift. Singular among their race, the inheritors of a long succession of elevated thought, the Vaudois have ever practiced an ideal virtue loftier than that of Plato. When feudalism taught that labor was dishonorable, the people of the valleys held every family disgraced that did not maintain itself by its own useful toil. When the learned Jesuits had proved that deceit was often lawful, the Vaudois declared that falsehood was the corruption of the soul. In the happy valleys no one desired to be rich, no one strove to rise in rank above his fellows. While in the gifted circles of the European capitals the purity of woman was scoffed at by philosophers and courtiers, in Lucerna and Perouse every maiden was a Lucretia. Crime had seldom been known in the peaceful valleys; it was only in barbarous lands where the Jesuits ruled that the assassin aimed his dagger or the robber plied his trade. To harm no one, to be at peace with all men, to forgive, to pity, were the natural impulses of every Vaudois; to heal the sick, to raise the low, to relieve the suffering stranger, formed the modest joys of the children of the valleys. In every age they remained the same; in every age they were Christians. The seventeenth century of their faith, perhaps of their existence, found them still an uncorrupted church, teaching to the world unlimited freedom of conscience. For this they were willing to peril their lives and fortunes; for this they had contended with popes and kings; and on every cliff and mountain peak of their native land was inscribed in immortal deeds the independence of the soul. Meantime, while no change had taken place in the Alpine church, its doctrines and rites had been accepted by all Northern Europe. In the seventeenth century the papacy had lost its most powerful and warlike adherents. England in 1650, ruled by Cromwell, instructed by Milton, stood in the front rank of the progressive nations. Holland and Northern Germany maintained their free schools and their liberal press in defiance of the Jesuits and the pope. France had been forced to tolerate the Huguenots. It was only over Italy and Spain that the inquisition of Loyola, founded in 1541, held its terrible sway. There the papal power had been erected upon a relentless despotism, and the unhappy people were rapidly sinking to a low rank among civilized nations. The rule of the Jesuits was followed by a total decay of morals, a general decline of the intellect. Once Italy had been the center of classic elegance, of the reviving arts, of the splendors of a new civilization. It was now the home of gross superstitions, a degraded priesthood, a hopeless people. Spain and Portugal, once the leaders in discovery, the rulers of the seas, had fallen into a new barbarism. The Jesuits, the inquisition, alone flourished in their fallen capitals and deserted ports; the manly vigor of the countrymen of the Cid had been corrupted by centuries of papal tyranny. In the seventeenth century the Vaudois were the only progressive portion of the Italian race. Every inhabitant of the valleys was educated; the barbes were excellent teachers, their people eager to learn; the laborers instructed each other as they toiled side by side on their mountains; their industry was the parent of active minds. If they produced no eminent poet to sing of dreadful war, no astute philosopher, no vigorous critic, they could at least point to several native historians of considerable merit; to their "Noble Lesson," the finest of mediæval poems; to their stirring hymns and versions of the psalms; to a long succession of intelligent barbes; to their missionaries of the Middle Ages; to their colleges and schools in Alpine caves. They might claim that the ideas of the valleys had promoted the civilization of Europe, and that their perpetual protest in favor of liberty of thought had been of more value to the world than Tasso's epic or Raphael's Madonnas.—Historical Studies.