p. 500 | The Missionary by Stephen Nelson Haskell

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Nov 8, 1883

The Missionary.

By Stephen Nelson Haskell

A Varied Experience.

At the close of seven months' constant fighting, in the year 1651, a treaty of peace was signed between Philip of Savoy and the deputies of the valleys. The people returned from their caves and places of retreat in the mountains to the valleys, to exchange their weapons of warfare for the spade and the pruning-knife. With tottering steps the feeble, and aged, and infirm, came once more to sit at noon or eve beneath the shadow of their vines and ancestral chestnut trees. Imagine their feelings when desolation and ruin had deformed everything that for months before was so smiling and green. Villages, in some cases, were only a heap of ruins. Years would pass before these deep scars could be effaced, and the beauty of the valleys be restored.

Before this treaty of peace was signed, the time of sowing was passed, so in the autumn there was scarcely anything to reap; and their destitution was further aggravated by the fugitives returning from Calabria, who began about this time to arrive in the valleys. They had escaped from the persecution that had come upon them with nothing but their lives. They themselves were in hunger and nakedness. Their brethren with open arms received them, and proposed, as one common family, to share the same fate which seemed inevitably to await them. The tale of their sufferings reached other countries, and the sympathy of their Protestant brethren was drawn out in their behalf. Calvin made collections for them at Geneva. The Protestants of France, Switzerland, and Germany, also made free contributions to assist them in their great destitution.

In process of time the harvests were restored to the valleys, and, with the blessing of God, houses and villages began to dot the sides of the mountains, and to rise upon the banks of the rivers. The misery of the past campaign was passing into oblivion, and they again began to rejoice that God was bringing them into a prosperous condition. But their vexations were soon renewed by others coming into power that planned evil against them, and began to restrict their liberties which had been granted them by the treaty of peace. A deputy Governor, Castrocaro, a Tuscan by birth, was the author of much perplexity and evil to this confiding people. He ordered the dismissal of certain pastors, and when the congregations refused to comply, began to fine and imprison them. He sent false reports to the court of the duke, and introduced soldiers into the country, on the pretext that the Waldenses were breaking out into rebellion.

In their extremity they sought help of the Protestant princes of Germany, and their cry found a responsive echo from the German plains. Frederick, Elector of Palatine, indited a letter to the duke that was remarkable indeed for a letter written during the middle of the sixteenth century: "Let your highness," says the Elector, "know that there is a God in Heaven, who not only contemplates the actions, but also tries the hearts and reins of men, and from whom nothing is hid. Let your highness take care not voluntarily to make war upon God, and not to persecute Christ in his members. . . . . Persecution, moreover, will never advance the cause it pretends to defend. The ashes of the martyrs are the seeds of the Christian Church. For the church resembles the palm-tree, whose stem only shoots up the taller the greater the weights that are hung upon it. Let your highness consider that the Christian religion was established by persuasion, and not by violence; and as it is certain that religion is nothing else than a firm and enlightened persuasion of God, and of his will as revealed in his Word, and engraven in the hearts of believers by his Holy Spirit, it cannot, when once rooted, be torn away by tortures."

What effect this letter had we do not know. This deputy Governor, who had planned the overthrow of the Waldenses during the sixteenth century, was finally arrested and carried to Turin, and there perished in prison. Famine, persecution, and war, had come upon this people. The brethren of the Reformed Church in France and Spain and Italy were perishing by massacre, or dying at the stake, while at this time these individuals were being guarded from harm; but a new calamity arose.

On the 23d of August, 1629, a cloud of unusual blackness gathered on the summit of one of the prominent mountains. It burst in a waterspout, or deluge. This swept away many of their houses, and the inhabitants barely had time to save their lives by flight. In September of the same year there came an icy wind, accompanied by a dry cloud, which destroyed the crop of the chestnut tree. There followed a second deluge of rain, which completely ruined the vintage. The Vaudois pastors, as was usual in their calamities, assembled together to humble themselves and lift up their voices in prayer to God. Soon after this a plague showed itself in the valley of Perosa. From this it spread to the northern valley, San Martino, and finally throughout all the valleys. In July and August the heat was excessive, and the malady raged yet more furiously. Four pastors were carried off by the plague; soon seven others died, and the following month the twelfth was mortally stricken. Only three pastors now remained, and they belonged to three valleys. They wrote to their Geneva brethren, requesting that other pastors might be sent to take their places.

The plague subsided during the winter, but in the spring of 1631 it rose again with renewed force. Of the surviving three pastors, one died. With the heat of the summer the pestilence waxed in strength. In Le Torre alone fifty families became extinct; and the most moderate estimate of the numbers cut off by the plague was two-thirds of the entire population of the valleys, which was said to be at least 10,000. The corn remained uncut, the grapes rotted on the bough, and the fruit dropped from the tree. Strangers that visited the valleys to regain their health in the pure mountain air, obtained from the soil nothing but a grave. Parents were without children; patriarchs who had gathered their families around them, with their numerous grandchildren, had seen them sicken and die. Ministers from Geneva and other places hastened to the valleys, lest the old lamp should go out. Up to this time the Italian language, in its purity, had been spoken by this people; but the French ministers spoke the French language, so the French as well as the Italian dialect, or rather a sort of a mixture of the two, from this time began to be spoken.

S. N. HASKELL.