THE VAUDOIS CHURCH. From the Quarterly Review. 1. The Crown or the Tiara! Considerations on the present Condition of the Waldenses; addressed to the Statesmen of Civilized Europe. London. 1842. Statement of the Grievances of the Wal denses. London. 1843. which alternately shine and retire from the top of a lighthouse. Forty years ago few even of the educated men in England knew of their existence: the sonnet of Milton was, indeed, imperishable; but while it was living poetry, it was at that time history a hundred and fifty years old, and called no man's attention to the actual successors of 'the saints of the Lord,' whose persecution Milton had immortalized. It is true that we might see in booksellers' catalogues, unread and unbought, a folio volume by Morland on the whole subject; and some happy bibliomaniac might rejoice in the possession of a copy of THE Vaudois have at various times occu- Henri Arnaud's Glorieuse Rentrée ;' but, ed prominently the attention of other and practically, the interest which at different instant nations; and, again, have disappeared tervals had been powerfully felt in different om observation like the revolving lights parts of Europe, and especially in England, MARCH, 1844. Report of the London Committee for the Extract from Waldensian Researches. 19 matters. in favor of the Vaudois-notably in the time | world in England received the whole as a of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, and of William discovery. Yet only a year before, another the Third-had been almost extinguished; chaplain of the East India Company, the and a century had well-nigh passed since any Rev. R. H. Kerr, had printed a letter about public manifestation of sympathy in their fate them; and the Asiatic Society had sent and fortunes had been exhibited in our own forth, two years before, the Baron von or any other country. Wrede's personal narrative of his visit to The same alternate light and darkness them. But the zeal, the piety, the enthu may be traced in reference to the history of siasm of Buchanan, and the graphic pages in our interest in other not wholly dissimilar which these qualities were embodied-while The case of the Native Christians the earlier works were forgotten, and the newin India is one. When the Portuguese first er works were unread-brought the church of discovered them, the fact excited the great- the Syrian Christians in India to the imagiest interest in Europe; and is prominently nation and the affections of their fellow-Chrisbrought forward in all the accounts in the tians in Europe, almost as if it were the dis'Novus Orbis' of Simon Grynæus and other covery and the restoration of a brother never early narrators or compilers. At the close of known. In like manner, the visit of Dr. the sixteenth century, a large number of Gilly to the valleys of Piedmont did not so them was reduced to the obedience of the much revive our recollections, as convey Church of Rome; and a community which new and undreamed-of knowledge to the in many respects resembled the Vaudois-in greater part of his countrymen at home. having preserved for ages, unsustained by in- The sensation which that publication excited tercourse or sympathy with their fellow-Chris--though, at the cold distance from it at tians in the West, and checked or persecuted which we now stand, no man will admit it to by their nearer neighbors, the pure faith of have been electrical-was certainly unparal their ancestors were compelled to surrender leled by any effect arising from analogous the independence of their church, and to admit the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff. The acts and decrees of the Synod of Diamper form one of the most curious monuments of the active and uncompromising and persecuting zeal of the papists of that age. For another century nothing is heard of the native Christians in India, till Michael Geddes translated a copy of the work of Meneses, and prefixed a large and valuable introduction. Notwithstanding the work in question, and that of La Croze, 'On the Christianity of the Indies' (1724)-i. e. on the existence of a small body of native Christians in the peninsula of India-none, we think, of the writers on India, from the date of La Croze* to the close of the last century, allude to them; and when the late Claudius Buchanan published his 'Researches,' and sketched the history and the state of the native Christians in the south of India, the * We are accustomed to smile at the cool ignorance with which an otherwise well-educated Frenchman perverts the names and titles of English authors and books, from the Messrs. B. White et Horace Head, Fleet Street,' downwards; but we ourselves are not always guiltless in respect to other languages. There is before us at this moment a volume on the Vaudois, in which La Haye,' where this work of La Croze was printed, is converted into an individual and independent authority. Gibbon informs us on the authority of Assemannus, Geddes, La Croze, and La Haye,' &c. :Gibbon's reference being (4to. edit. vol. iv. p. 601) to La Croze in two vols. 12mo., La Haye, a learned and agreeable work:' and we could causes in our own times, excepting that which had been produced twenty years before by the revival of our knowledge of the Indian churches. It is singular, indeed, that within the preceding eight years a valuable English clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Sims, had visited, and in a short pamphlet had described the Vaudois valleys; but his publication excited less attention than it deserved; and the subject was forgotten when Dr. Gilly first wrote. In some of the highest and must secluded valleys of the Italian Alps live, and, excepting for a few years of memorable exile terminated by a still more memorable return, have lived for many ages, we might almost say from time immemorial, the Protestants, without and before the name of Protestants, the Vaudois of Piedmont Into this country, which the eye of the traveller at Turin had often overlooked when gazing on the name, if naming would not needlessly pain, a not inconsiderable Greek scholar, who, finding certain apt passages from the German quoted seriatim from a certain author, for whose name, after the first citation, Ditto or Ebend. (the usual contraction for Ebenderselbe, even the same') is given-transforms Ditto into a distinct and different person, and a person of celebrity too, and wishes his readers to believe not only that he has read Ditto's works, but that they also ought to take their judgment from Ditto: Thus it is well observed by a celebrated German writer (Ebend) that man errs first by taking theories for experiences,' &c. &c. 'Let him and his ingenious brethren lay to heart an admirable remark of Ebend :' &c. pure and perfect cone of Monte Viso at the The consequence was in some degree a rehead of these valleys, no traveller, neverthe- action; and when other inquirers ascertainless, we mean no writer of travels,'-had ed not only, as they might have discovered entered, till in the year 1823 Mr. Gilly, with even from Dr. Gilly's first work, (1824,) his three pupils, making the ordinary tour though more fully and explicity in his 'Walof Europe, diverged from the beaten line, densian Researches,' (1831,) that there was and took up his quarters at La Tour, the no real episcopacy among the Vaudois, but capital of the Waldenses. The narrative of that some of the actual generation of pastors, his own rambles among their mountains-the and consequently of the people, were largely account of the physical privations to which, tainted by neological errors, arising from the like other inhabitants of Alpine regions, they Swiss education of their ministers-a feeling are exposed the statement of the persecu- of indifference, if not more, succeeded to the tions to which they, and they only in the first burst of admiration and delight. present generation of the inhabitants of those Dr. Gilly took a juster view of the case and Alpine regions, are still subjected-the beau- of his own duty. He had honestly told the tiful traits of domestic life which he brought world his own impressions of the church and forward-the primitive poverty and primitive people; he had been young and enthusipiety of their Moderator, as sketched by him- astic; and those impressions were more faand the statement of the Catholic doctrines of vorable than a reconsideration and a second their church, untainted by the apostacies of visit could sustain. His part was taken; he Rome, which he found, or believed himself to had bound up his fate and his fame with the have found, in their creed and ritual-interest- Vaudois; and if they were not all that his ed every class of readers in England; and for a early hope had painted them to be, he time we might have indulged the hope that the would labor to give them the means of besympathy thus excited in behalf of the Vaudois coming so. would have been permanent. But the subject, like every other, had its day; the wedge was driven out of sight by another wedge; and the state and prospects of the inhabitants of the Vaudois valleys of Piedmont were withdrawn from our observation by the interposition of nearer and more obtrusive questions. With this view, on his return from his second journey, in 1829, he, in concert with the Vaudois Committee,' which had been formed in London at his suggestion in 1825, took measures for the establishment of a superior order of schools in the Valleys. The most grievous of the wants of the Vaudois was the want of the means of education within their It must be owned, too,-we say it with un- own frontiers, or even within the kingdom to feigned respect to Dr. Gilly-that he had which, by the treaties of Vienna, they were proved, or rather had attempted to prove, too again annexed. The young men intended much. He had colored his landscape too for the ministry among them were sent forth highly. Every tourist in the Alps knows the at the most critical age, not merely beyond effect of the sunset of a brilliant day on the the control of their own friends, but beyond summit of the Jungfrau,or Mont Blanc; there the supervision of their own countrymen, to is a roseate hue on the mountain-top, which, receive such an education as Geneva or Laufor a few minutes, invests the snow with an sanne might give them. Whatever may be unreal character. In the same way Dr. Gilly the possible value of that education, consaw on the surface of the Vaudois church ducted by the Swiss for the Swiss with all couleur de rose instead of snow, episcopacy the restraints of country, if not of home instead of presbyterianism, a bishop instead around them, it is clear that such possible of a moderator. We do not mean literally value is reduced almost beyond calculation that he represented the form of church gov- when the recipient is a young stranger, who, ernment other than it was; his common for the first time in his life, finds himself sense, as well as his principles, of both of alone and uncontrolled in a city fifty times which we think most highly, would alike larger than any town in his own mountains; have prevented him from committing a crime so gratuitous and so easily detected; but his parental interest in a people to whom he was in a manner giving a new life in the world of European literature, made him anxious to find in them every feature of resemblance which he thought might prove their original; and every fault he touched with the tenderness of a father ' Appellat Pætum pater.' and the evil of such a system becomes still greater when it is considered that the youth so sent forth was to be sent back to minister in a church which had not the safeguards of a liturgy to guide or support him. These considerations induced Dr. Gilly to propose the establishment of a college at La Tourfor the education of those Vaudois more especially, who were destined for the pastoral office among their countrymen and his endeavors were nobly aided by an anonymous tically and apart from a play of words, Probenefactor, as stated in the reports of the testantism, in the sense in which it is London Committee; and, above all, in purse used by the great body of the people of Engand person, by Colonel Beckwith, a name land, represents the doctrines of the Bible as well known for distinguished gallantry in distinct from the doctrines of men. war, and since still better known by the active sympathy, and self-denying zeal, with which, almost continually on the spot, he has identified himself with the Vaudois. The college of the Holy Trinity has thus arisen. The foundation of Protestantism is the affirmation that Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation: and while, as in the case of our own Church, Protestantism quotes with respect councils and fathers as witnesses to facts, or as depositoHere, under the eyes of their own families, ries of opinion, it denies that any thing either will henceforth be educated the rising minis- in councils or in fathers has either strength ters of the Vaudois people; but, if the bene- or authority, unless the same be sustained by fit thus implied were the only benefit, which Holy Scripture. The time for these declarathat people had derived from the stimulus tions has arrived. When others avow their providentially imparted to them by the Chris- settled purpose to 'unprotestantize' the Engtian sympathy of those, who were themselves lish Church, and when they mourn over the conscious of their own higher privileges, and Reformation as a woe, and over the Revoluof the duty of communicating them wherever tion as a rebellion and a sin, those on the it might be possible, the church of the Vau- other hand who regard the Reformation as the dois would have been left in a state still more chief of the blessings which God has entrustthan it is below the level of that happier com-ed to England, and who look back with munity which had interposed in its behalf. gratitude to the Revolution as the human But the Vaudois pastors have now adopted means by which Providence continued to a ritual of their own, called the Waldensian this Church and Nation that great blessing Liturgy; and they have also adopted a con- of the Reformation, must not shrink, in sifession of faith to which they require sub- lent passiveness, from the duty of proclaimscription, thus defining and guarding the doc-ing their juster sense of the duties and the trines of their church, and at least pointing privileges of their condition. The Protestthe way to consistent views of ecclesiastical antism which is enshrined in the United government and unity. The happy result Church of England and Ireland as establishof these improvements is, that none of the ed in these realms is our Protestantism; but Waldensian clergy are, as we are assured, while we humbly and gratefully acknowledge any longer under the suspicion of entertain- our own distinguishing blessing, we must ing either Socinian or neological errors. not refuse sympathy with those who, under The claim of the Vaudois, however, to the less favorable circumstances, have at any sympathy and succor of the people of Eng-time renounced the bondage of our common land, does not depend on the proof of the ap-foe. proximation of their system in doctrine and Such is the church of the Vaudois: it has in discipline to that of the Church of Eng-lost in the escape its episcopal character, land. We cordially wish that there could and its share in the ancient Liturgies of the be found a nearer approach than, we confess Church; we deplore these losses most it reluctantly, we can find on the part of deeply-but it has regained (we will not these our brethren to the duties and the call it the right, but) the duty of private privileges of our own establishment. But judgment, from the discharge of which duty we can never forget that their real claim to the tyranny of Rome compulsorily withholds our sympathy at all times, and to our suc- its slaves; and it has regained the free use of cor when required, arises, first, from their the Scriptures, which ought to be to the soul Protestantism; and secondly, from the Trea- of every one of us like the light and air of ties to which England is a party in support animal life. of them, on the ground, eo nomine, of such In these elements of Protestantism the their Protestantism. Of that word and of that Vaudois are as we are in the enjoyment of 'thing' we are not ashamed. We have heard these blessings we are bound to desire to of a zealous friend of the Vaudois being protect every one already in possession warned when he was glorying in his Protest- of them, and to desire to extend that possesantism, not to glory in a negative. We sion to every one not as yet so favored: on are aware of the philological accuracy on these grounds a Vaudois might appeal to us; which that warning rests; and that, abstract- but it is not on an indefinite generality only edly, Protestantism is the renunciation of that he is entitled to rest. He can refer error, not the assertion of truth: but prac- to Treaties made specifically for his protec |