Europe trembled, and whose banner the Pope had blessed in certain assurance of triumph? Who could be stupid enough to ascribe it to nature, and not to a divine providence, that the people of the valleys had not in summer reaped their crops, but found, on their return to the valley of St. Martin, bread, wine, meat, rice, legumes, flour, corn, cut and uncut, their gardens in fine condition, and a plentiful gathering of chestnuts and grapes; and, moreover, that the corn which they were not able to cut in time, was preserved under the snow, through a long and hard winter, till the following January, February, and even May, without being spoiled? Can anyone believe that about 367 people of the valley of Balsill had been able, on a diet of herbs, beans, and water, and lying on straw, to resist 10,000 French and 12,000 Piedmontese, who had besieged them, not only with abundance of arms, ammunition, provisions, and everything, and who had brought mules loaded with ropes to hang them with, and had done this by any other power than the direct power of God, who is the King of kings, and jealous of His honour? That the Waldenses fought more than eighteen battles against these swarming hosts which had penetrated into their valleys, and destroyed above 10,000 of them in their march of nine days, yet lost only about seventy of themselves? And that, at length, their unnatural ruler should be compelled to seek the aid of the very men whom he had thus hunted down, whose fields and houses he had burnt, and whom he had given up as prey to the French and papal commissioners ? '

This last event was occasioned by the French and Amadeus II. coming to open feud and war. Thus the miserable duke sought humbly to these his outraged subjects to save him from the very hell-hounds that he had turned loose on them. Thus this despicable duke published in all haste an edict in May 1694, by which he restored the Waldenses to all their property and rights, and gave them full freedom of religion. Then he whiningly told them that, if they would be true to their duke as they had been to their God, he

WALDENSIAN COLONIES.

39

would love and cherish them as dear children. The loyal people joined his standard, helped him to beat back his most formidable foe, and were immediately rewarded for their gallant conduct by being deprived again of all rights; and all who were not born in the valleys were ordered, on pain of death, to quit them within two months. The number of these amounted to 3,000. They were driven away in the most destitute condition, and the noble Arnaud volunteered to lead them into Protestant countries. They marched to Geneva, and thence into Prussia, Hesse Cassel, Hesse Darmstadt, Würtemberg, and other states, where lands and villages were assigned them, and there they remain, as Waldensian colonies, to this day. For many years they received a considerable money allowance from England, the English Government also paying annually 250l. for the support of thirteen pastors in the valleys of Piedmont. Arnaud received a pension from England, and was made a colonel of the British army by William III. He died the head of the Würtemberg colony in 1721. It is only in very recent times that the Waldenses have received decent treatment from their own Government, but their faith is now rapidly revolutionising the north of Italy.

6

Such was the spiritualism of the Waldenses. Well might Arnaud declare that the interpositions of God on their behalf were non seulement extraordinaires, mais même surnaturels.' Well may Leger, their historian (Histoire des Eglises Evangéliques Vaudoises) declare their deliverances as most miraculous.' On one occasion he says, they were carried off in great numbers from their harvest fields, and cast into different prisons, but their enemies, to their unbounded astonishment, soon found them all at liberty again, equally to the amazement of the captives themselves, who knew nothing of the arrest of their fellows in different places at the same time, and were set free again 'miraculously,' and in a wonderful manner.

It was of this miraculously preserved church that even the venerable St. Bernard, of Clairvaux, in 1140, said,

There is a sect which calls itself after no man's name, which affects to be in the direct line of apostolic succession, and rustic and unlearned though it is, yet it contends that we are wrong and that it is only right;' and he adds in the true spirit of Catholic priests of to-day, as expressed towards spiritualism, It must derive its origin from the devil, since there is no other extraction which we can assign to it' (Sermo sup. Cant. 66). What their faith was the great Bernard might have read in the Nobla Leyçon,' the poem expounding their doctrines, and extant at least forty years before. This people, whose origin was thus charitably ascribed to Satan, is now being held as especial favourites of the Church of England, and has wrung from one of its members William Stephen Gilly, Prebendary of Durham, otherwise so incognisant of the miraculous, this sentence, 'It was the will of God that they should be left as a remnant, because it was written in the counsels of heaven that they should continue as a miracle of divine grace and providence' (Waldensian Researches,' p. 289).

CHAPTER IV.

THE SUPERNATURAL AMONGST THE SO-CALLED HERETICS AND MYSTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

That effect, that sanguinary struggle with which humanity wrestling, so to speak, against itself, seizes one by one the most necessary truths, the bad grace with which it is done, and the incapacity of not doing otherwise, indicate two things at once; the first, that man cannot do without the truth; the second, that he is not in fellowship with the truth. But truth is one, and all those truths successively discovered are only parts, or diverse applications of it.

VINET'S Vital Christianity, p. 72.

Spricht man aber, wie jetzt die Zeiten laufen, solche Worte aus, sogleich wird aus der Ferne dumpfer, immer näher kommender Schall der Lärmtrommel vernommen; wie der Staub auf den Wegen, so wird ein zahlreich Volk vom geschlagenen Wirbel aufgerührt; Väter und Älterväter und ihre Kinder und Kinders Kinder kommen in Hast herbeigelaufen, alle rufend: Mystik, Aberglauben, Pfaffentrug, Mönchbethörung, nieder mit der Mystik.

Die Christliche Mystik von J. GÖRRES, i. 1.

But if, as the times go, one but utter such words, immediately we hear from a distance the dull, but ever-approaching sound of the alarmdrum. Like the dust on the roads, a swarm of people are roused into a furious whirlwind; father and grandfather, and their children and children's children, come running in hot haste, all shrieking, 'Mysticism! Superstition! Priestcraft! Monkscheatery ! down with Mysticism !'

BESIDES the Waldenses there were numbers of other so

called heretics, so called by the Roman Church. In every age of the church these so-called heretics have abounded, from the earliest Manichæans, Pelagians, and Montanists to the Flagellants and the Anabaptists of Westphalia. The idea which numbers of writers have employed to account for these manifestations, that they result from mere delusion,

from excited imaginations, and hallucinations, is the shallowest of ideas; the result of the profoundest ignorance of the human soul. The cause assumed is utterly inadequate to the production of the effects; it is an attempt to raise a fountain higher than the spring-head. In the worst of these demonstrations things have been done and prophecies enunciated which nothing but a spiritual power, seeing farther than man sees, could originate. It is not the property of disease and delusion to strike out truths, and truths lying often buried in the depth of years and distances. I have produced too many instances of such things arising out of the most disorderly spiritualism in every age and in every country, to make it requisite to reproduce them here. Even fools, so called, have often astonished the so-called wisest and soberest men by their flashes of superhuman knowledge. Take ancient or modern times, we find it the same. Nicetas Goniates relates in his life of Isaac Angelus that, when the emperor was at Rodostes, he paid a visit to a man called Basilicus, who had the reputation of possessing the faculty of seeing into futurity, but who was otherwise regarded by all sensible persons as a fool. Basilicus received the emperor without any particular marks of respect, and returned no answer to his questions. Instead of doing so, he walked towards the emperor's picture, which hung in the apartment, scratched out the eyes with his staff, and attempted to strike the hat from his head. The emperor took his leave, setting him down as a perfect fool. Nevertheless, all that Basilicus intimated came to pass. The emperor was deposed in a rebellion, and his brother Alexis, being placed on the throne, put out his eyes.

Claus, the court-fool at Weimar, rushed into the councilroom on one occasion, as the council was sitting, exclaiming, ‘There you all are, consulting, no doubt, about very important matters; but nobody gives a thought about the fire at Colmar, nor how it is to be extinguished!' On the arrival of the mail it was found that at that moment an alarming fire was raging at Colmar.