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One would like to have a near view of the barbes or pastors,
who presided over the school of early Protestant theology that existed in the
valleys, and to know how it fared with evangelical Christianity in the ages that
preceded the Reformation. But the time is remote, and the events are dim. We can
but doubtfully glean from a variety of sources the facts necessary to form a
picture of this venerable Church, and even then the picture is not complete. The
theology of which this was one of the fountain-heads was not the clear,
well-defined, and comprehensive system which the sixteenth century gave us; it
was only what the faithful men of the Lombard Churches had been able to save
from the wreck of primitive Christianity. True religion, being a revelation, was
from the beginning complete and perfect; nevertheless, in this as in every other
branch of knowledge, it is only by patient labour that man is able to extricate
and arrange all its parts, and to come into the full possession of truth. The
theology taught in former ages in the peak-environed valley in which we have in
imagination placed ourselves was drawn from the Bible. The atoning death and
justifying righteousness of Christ was its cardinal truth. This, the Nobla
Leycon [Noble Lesson] and other ancient documents abundantly testify. The Nobla
Leycon sets forth with tolerable clearness the doctrine of the Trinity, the fall
of man, the incarnation of the Son, the perpetual authority of the Decalogue as
given by God [this disproves the charge of Manicheism brought against them by
their enemies], the need of Divine grace in order to good works, the necessity
of holiness, the institution of the ministry, the resurrection of the body, and
the eternal bliss of heaven. [Sir Samuel Morland gives the Nobla Leycon in full
in his History of the Churches of the Waldenses. Allix (chap. 18) gives a
summary of it.] This creed its professors exemplified in lives of evangelical
virtue. The blamelessness of the Waldenses passed into a proverb, so that one
more than ordinarily exempt from the vices of his time was sure to be suspected
of being a Vaudes. [The Nobla Leycon has the following passage:--"If there be an
honest man, who desires to love God and fear Jesus Christ, who will neither
slander, nor swear, nor lie, nor commit adultery, nor kill, nor steal, nor
avenge himself of his enemies, they presently say of such a one he is a Vaudes,
and worthy of death."]
If doubt there were regarding the tenets of the Waldenses,
the charges which their enemies have preferred against them would set that doubt
at rest, and make it tolerably certain that they held substantially what the
apostles before their day, and the Reformers after it, taught. The indictment
against the Waldenses included a formidable list of "heresies." They held that
there had been no true Pope since the days of Sylvester; that temporal offices
and dignities were not meet for preachers of the Gospel; that the Pope’s pardons
were a cheat; that purgatory was a fable; that relics were simply rotten bones
which had belonged to one knew not whom; that to go on pilgrimage served no end,
save to empty one’s purse; that flesh might be eaten any day if one’s appetite
served him; that holy water was not a whit more efficacious than rain-water; and
that prayer in a barn was just as effectual as if offered in a church. They were
accused, moreover, of having scoffed at the doctrine of transubstantiation, and
of having spoken blasphemously of Rome as the harlot of the Apocalypse. [See a
list of numerous heresies and blasphemies charged upon the Waldenses by the
Inquisitor-Reynerius, who wrote about the year 1250, and extracted by Allix
(chap. 22).]
There is reason to believe, from recent historical
researches, that the Waldenses possessed the New Testament in the vernacular.
The "Lingua Romana," or Romaunt tongue, was the common language of the south of
Europe from the eighth to the fourteenth century. It was the language of the
troubadours and of men of letters in the Dark Ages. Into this tongue—the
Romaunt—was the first translation of the whole of the New Testament made so
early as the twelfth century. This fact Dr. Gilly has been at great pains to
prove in his work, The Romaunt Version of the Gospel according to John. [The
Romaunt Version of the Gospel according to John, from MS. preserved in Trinity
College, Dublin, and in the Bibliotheque du Roi, Paris. By William Stephen
Gilly, D.D., Canon of Durham, and Vicar of Norham. Lond., 1848.] The sum of what
Dr. Gilly, by a patient investigation into facts, and a great array of historic
documents, maintains, is that all the books of the New Testament were translated
from the Latin Vulgate into the Romaunt, that this was the first literal version
since the fall of the empire, that it was made in the twelfth century, and was
the first translation available for popular use. There were numerous earlier
translations, but only of parts of the Word of God, and many of these were
rather paraphrases or digests of Scripture than translations, and, moreover,
they were so bulky, and by consequence so costly, as to be utterly beyond the
reach of the common people. This Romaunt version was the first complete and
literal translation of the New Testament of Holy Scripture; it was made, as Dr.
Gilly, by a chain of proofs, shows, most probably under the superintendence and
at the expense of Peter Waldo of Lyons, not later than 1180, and so is older
than any complete version in German, French, Italian, Spanish, or English. This
version was widely spread in the south of France, and in the cities of Lombardy.
It was in common use among the Waldenses of Piedmont, and it was no small part,
doubtless, of the testimony borne to truth by these mountaineers to preserve and
circulate it. Of the Romaunt New Testament six copies have come down to our day.
A copy is preserved at each of the four following places: Lyons, Grenoble,
Zurich, Dublin; and two copies at Paris. These are small, plain, and portable
volumes, contrasting with those splendid and ponderous folios of the Latin
Vulgate, penned in characters of gold and silver, richly illuminated, their
bindings decorated with gems, inviting admiration rather than study, and
unfitted by their size and splendour for the use of the people.
The Church of the Alps, in the simplicity of its
constitution, may be held to have been a reflection of the Church of the first
centuries. The entire territory included in the Waldensian limits was divided
into parishes. In each parish was placed a pastor, who led his flock to the
living waters of the Word of God. He preached, he dispensed the Sacraments, he
visited the sick, and catechised the young. With him was associated in the
government of his congregation a consistory of laymen. The synod met once a
year. It was composed of all the pastors, with an equal number of laymen, and
its most frequent place of meeting was the secluded mountain-engirdled valley at
the head of Angrogna. Sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty barbes, with the
same number of lay members, would assemble. We can imagine them seated—it may be
on the grassy slopes of the valley—a venerable company of humble, learned,
earnest men, presided over by a simple moderator (for higher office or authority
was unknown amongst them), and suspending their deliberations respecting the
affairs of their Churches, and the condition of their flocks, only to offer
their prayers and praises to the Eternal, while the majestic snow-clad peaks
looked down upon them from the silent firmament. There needed, verily, no
magnificent fane, no blazonry of mystic rites to make their assembly
august.
The youth who here sat at the feet of the more venerable and
learned of their barbes used as their text-book the Holy Scriptures. And not
only did they study the sacred volume; they were required to commit to memory,
and be able accurately to recite, whole Gospels and Epistles. This was a
necessary accomplishment on the part of public instructors in those ages when
printing was unknown, and copies of the Word of God were rare. Part of their
time was occupied in transcribing the Holy Scriptures, or portions of them,
which they were to distribute when they went forth as missionaries. By this, and
by other agencies, the seed of the Divine Word was scattered throughout Europe
more widely than is commonly supposed. To this a variety of causes contributed.
There was then a general impression that the world was soon to end. Men thought
that they saw the prognostications of its dissolution in the disorder into which
all things had fallen. The pride, luxury, and profligacy of the clergy, led not
a few laymen to ask if better and more certain guides were not to be had. Many
of the troubadours were religious men, whose lays were sermons. The hour of deep
and universal slumber had passed; the serf was contending with his seigneur for
personal freedom, and the city was waging war with the baronial castle for civic
and corporate independence. The New Testament—and, as we learn from incidental
notices, portions of the Old—coming at this juncture in a language understood
alike in the court as in the camp, in the city as in the rural hamlet, was
welcome to many, and its truths obtained a wider promulgation than perhaps had
taken place since the publication of the Vulgate by Jerome.
After passing a certain time in the school of the barbes, it
was not uncommon for the Waldensian youth to proceed to the seminaries in the
great cities of Lombardy, or to the Sorbonne at Paris. There they saw other
customs, were initiated into other studies, and had a wider horizon around them
than in the seclusion of their native valleys. Many of them became expert
dialecticians, and often made converts of the rich merchants with whom they
traded, and the landlords in whose houses they lodged. The priests seldom cared
to meet in argument the Waldensian missionary.
To maintain the truth in their own mountains was not the only
object of this people. They felt their relations to the rest of Christendom. The
sought to drive back the darkness, and re-conquer the kingdom which Rome had
overwhelmed. They were an evangelistic as well as an evangelical Church. It was
an old law among them that all who took orders in their Church should, before
being eligible to a home charge, serve three years in the mission field. The
youth on whose head the assembled barbes laid their hands saw in prospect not a
rich benefice, but a possible martyrdom. The ocean they did not cross. Their
mission field was the realms that lay outspread at the foot of their own
mountains. They went forth two and two, concealing their real character under
the guise of a secular profession, most commonly that of merchants or pedlars.
They carried silks, jewellery, and other articles, at that time not easily
purchasable save at distant mart, and they were welcomed as merchants where they
would have been spurned as missionaries. The door of the cottage and the portal
of the baron’s castle stood equally open to them. But their address was mainly
shown in selling, without money and without price, rarer and more valuable
merchandise than the gems and silks which had procured them entrance. They took
care to carry with them, concealed among their wares or about their persons,
portions of the Word of God, their own transcription commonly, and to this they
would draw the attention of the inmates. When they saw a desire to possess it,
they would freely make a gift of it where the means of purchase were
absent.
There was no kingdom of Southern and Central Europe to which
these missionaries did not find their way, and where they did not leave traces
of their visit in the disciples whom they made. On the west they penetrated into
Spain. In Southern France they found congenial fellow-labourers in the
Albigenses, by whom the seeds of truth were plentifully scattered over Dauphine
and Languedoc. On the east, descending the Rhine and the Danube, they leavened
Germany, Bohemia, and Poland with their doctrines, their track being marked with
the edifices for worship and the stakes of martyrdom that arose around their
steps. [Stranski, apud, Lenfant’s Concile de Constance, quoted by Count Valerian
Krasinski in his History of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Reformation
in Poland, vol. i., p. 53; Lond., 1838. Illyricus Flaccius, in his Catalogus
Testium Veritatis (Amstelodami, 1679), says: "Pars Valdensium in Germaniam
transiit atque apud Bohemos in Polonia ac Livonia sedem fixit." Leger says that
the Waldenses had, about the year 1210, Churches in Slavonia, Sarmatia, and
Livonia. (Histoire Generale des Eglises Evangeliques des Vallees du Piedmont ou
Vaudois, vol. ii., pp. 336,337; 1669.)] Even the Seven-hilled City they feared
not to enter, scattering the seed on ungenial soil, if perchance some of it
might take root and grow. Their naked feet and coarse woollen garments made them
somewhat marked figures, in the streets of a city that clothed itself in purple
and fine linen; and when their real errand was discovered, as sometimes chanced,
the rulers of Christendom took care to further, in their own way, the springing
of the seed, by watering it with the blood of the men who had sowed it [McCrie,
Hist. Ref. in Italy, p. 4].
Thus did the Bible in those ages, veiling its majesty and its
mission, travel silently through Christendom, entering homes and hearts, and
there making its abode. From her lofty seat Rome looked down with contempt upon
the Book and its humble bearers. She aimed at bowing the necks of kings,
thinking if they were obedient meaner men would not dare revolt, and so she took
little heed of a power which, weak as it seemed, was destined at a future day to
break in pieces the fabric of her dominion. By-and-by she began to be uneasy,
and to have a boding of calamity. The penetrating eye of Innocent III. detected
the quarter whence danger was to arise. He saw in the labours of these humble
men the beginning of a movement which, if permitted to go on and gather
strength, would one day sweep away all that it had taken the toils and intrigues
of centuries to achieve. He straightway commenced those terrible crusades which
wasted the sowers but watered the seed, and helped to bring on, at its appointed
hour, the catastrophe which he sought to avert.
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