CHAPTER IV. ANTIQUITY AND PURITY OF THE VAUDOIS DOCTRINE, PROVED BY
THEIR OWN WRITINGS
As the Vaudois have been accused of being Manicheans, Arians, and Cathares,* we shall be but doing our ancestors justice to appeal to their own writings. In the preface to the French Bible, which they printed at Neuchatel, in 1535, the Vaudois render thanks to God that having received the treasure of the gospel from the apostles or their immediate successors, they had always preserved to themselves the enjoyment of this blessing. In proof of which it appears by the noble Leiçon, dated 1100, that they had rejected and continued to reject all traditions, nor had ever received other doctrines than those contained in the Holy Scriptures.
* From Cathari, white, pure.
The treatise on Antichrist, dated 1120, proves the same point; as does that against the invocation of saints, which must have been written in the sixth century, since it calls this error a doctrine then in the bud, and we know that it took its rise at that period. So in all the confessions of faith given at divers times, the Vaudois profess to have received their tenets from father to son, from the time of the apostles. Rorenco himself has preserved one of their petitions to the Duke of Savoy, dated 1599, in which they say, that it is not within a few hundred years only that they have had knowledge of the truth, and that no one could be ignorant of their having taught the same tenets for 500 or 600 years, that is, when they openly declared against the abuses of Rome, under their Bishop, Claude. The Vaudois of the valleys Mathias and Meane* made the same declaration, (nearly in the same words,) when they were forced in 1603 to quit their country, for refusing to obey the order of Charles Emanuel, to abandon their faith. Finally in all their memorials, petitions, and letters, they have never failed to repeat the same thing, praying to be left in the enjoyment of that religion, which they had professed time immemorial even before the Dukes of Savoy were princes of Piémont. The authenticity of these petitions, &c. is unquestionable, since they have been printed, together with the answers to them, by order of the court of Turin, and are more than 100 in number.
** The Vaudois of these valleys formed one body with those
of Luzerne, Perouse, and St. Martin.