"A blending of all beauties, streams and dells,
Fruits, foliage, crag, wood, corn-field, mountain, vine."
General Beckwith did me the honour to call at my hotel, and I walked with him to the church. Outside the building—for worship had not commenced—were numerous little conversational parties; and around it lay the Vaudois dead, sleeping beneath the shadow of their giant rock, and free, at last and for ever, from the oppressor. They had found another "exodus" from their house of bondage than that which King Charles Albert had granted their living descendants. We entered, and found the schoolmaster reading the liturgy. This service consists of two chapters of the Bible, with at times the reflections of Ostervald annexed; during it the congregation came dropping in,—the husbandmen and herdsmen of the Val Lucerna,—and took their seats. In a little the elders entered in a body, and seated themselves round a table in front of the pulpit. Next came the pastor, habited, like our Scotch ministers, in gown and bands, when the regent instantly ceased. The pastor began the public worship by giving out a psalm. He next offered a prayer, read the ten commandments, and then preached. The sermon was an half-hour's length precisely, and was recited, not read; for I was told the Waldenses have a strong dislike to read discourses. The minister of La Tour is an old man, and was trained under an order of things unfavourable to that higher standard of pulpit qualification, and that fuller manifestation of evangelical and spiritual feeling, which, I am glad to say, characterize all the younger Waldensian pastors. The people listened with great attention to his scriptural discourse; but I was sorry to observe that there were few Bibles among them,—a circumstance that may be explained perhaps with reference to the state of the weather, and the long distance which many of them have to travel. The storm had the effect at least of thinning the audience, and bringing it down from about 800, its usual number, to 500 or so. The church was an oblong building, with the pulpit on one of the side walls, and a deep gallery, resting on thick, heavy pillars, on the other. The men and women occupied separate places. With this exception, I saw nothing to remind me that I was out of Scotland. One may find exactly such another congregation in almost any part of our Scottish Highlands, with this difference, that the complexions of the Vaudois are darker than that of our Highlanders. They have the same hardy, weather-beaten features, and the same robust frames. I saw many venerable and some noble heads among them,—men who would face the storms of the Alps for the lost wanderer of the flock, and the edicts and soldiers of Rome for their home-steads and altars. There they sat, worshipping their fathers' God, amid their fathers' mountains,—victorious over twelve centuries of proscription and persecution, and holding their sanctuaries and their hills in defiance of Europe. In the evening Professor Malan preached in the schoolhouse of Margarita, a small village on the ascent from La Tour to Castelluzzo. He discoursed with great unction, and the crowded audience hung upon his lips.
On my way back to my hotel, Professor Malan narrated to me a touching anecdote, which I must here put down. Monsignor Mazzarella was a judge in one of the High Courts of Sicily; but when the atrocities of the re-action began, he refused to be a tool of the Government, and resigned his office. He came to Turin, like numerous other political refugees; and in one of the re-unions of the workmen, he learned the doctrine of "justification by faith." Soon thereafter, that is, in the summer of 1851, he and a few companions paid a visit to the Vaudois Church. A public meeting, over which Professor Malan presided, was held at La Tour, to welcome M. Mazzarella and his friends. Professor Malan expressed his delight at seeing them in "the Valleys;" welcomed them as the first fruits of Italy; and, in the name of the Vaudois Church, gave them the right hand of fellowship. The reply of the converted exiles was truly affecting, and moved the assembly to tears. Rising up, Mazzarella said, "We are the children of your persecutors; but the sons have other hearts than the fathers. We have renounced the religion of the oppressor, and embraced that of the Vaudois, whom our ancestors so long persecuted. You have been the people of God, the confessors of the truth; and here before you this night I confess the sin of my fathers in putting your fathers to death." Mazzarella at this day is an evangelist in Genoa. In his speech we hear the first utterance of repentant Christendom. "The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee the city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel."
I had now been well nigh a week in "the Valleys." A dream long and fondly cherished had become a reality; and next morning I started for Turin.
The eventful history of the Vaudois teaches one lesson at least, which we Protestants would do well to ponder at this hour. The measures of the Church of Rome are quick, summary, and on a scale commensurate with the danger. Her motto is instant, unpitying, unsparing, utter extermination of all that oppose her. Twice over has the human mind revolted against her authority, and twice over has she met that revolt, not with argument, but with the sword. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Waldensian movement had grown to such a head, that the dominion of Rome was in imminent jeopardy. Had she delayed, the Reformation would have been anticipated by some centuries. She did not delay. She cried for help to the warriors of France and Savoy; and, by the help of some hundred thousand soldiers, she put down the Waldensian movement as an aggressive power. The next revolt against her authority was the Reformation. Here again she boldly confronted the danger. She grasped her old weapon; and, by the help of the sword and the Jesuits, she put down that movement in one half the countries of Europe, and greatly weakened it in the other half.
We are now witnessing a third revolt against her authority; and it remains to be seen how the Church of Rome will deal with it. Will she now adopt half measures? Will she now falter and draw back,—she that never before feared enemy or spared foe? Will that Church that quenched in blood the Protestantism of the Waldenses,—that put down the Reformation in France by one terrible blow,—that by the help of dungeons and racks banished the light from Italy and Spain,—will that Church, we ask, spare the Protestantism of Britain? What folly and infatuation to think that she will! What matters it that, in rooting out British Protestantism, she should shed oceans of blood, and sound the death-knell of a whole nation? These are but dust in the balance to her: her dominion must be maintained at all costs. Her motto still is,—let Rome triumph though the heavens should fall. But she tells us that she repents. Repents, does she? She has grown pitiful, and tender hearted, has she? She fears blood now, and starts at the cry of murdered nations! Ah! she repents; but it is her clemency, not her crimes, of which she repents. She repents that she did not make one wide St Bartholomew of Europe; that when she planted the stake for Huss, and Cranmer, and Wishart, she did not plant a million of stakes. Then the Reformation would not have been. Yes, she repents, deeply, bitterly repents, her fatal blunder. But it will not be her fault, the Univers assures us, if she have to repent such a blunder a second time. Let us hear the priests speaking through one of the country papers in France:—"The wars of religion were not deplorable catastrophes; these great butcheries renewed the life of France. The incense cast away the smell of the corpses, and psalms covered the noise of angry shouts. Holy water washed away all the bloody stains. With the Inquisition, the most beautiful weather succeeded to storms, and the fires that burned the heretics shone like supernatural torches." The hand that wrote these lines would more gladly light the faggot. Let only the present regime in France last a few years, and the priests will again rejoice in seeing the colour of heretic blood. There cannot and will not be peace in the world, they say, till for every Protestant a gibbet or stake has been erected, and not one man left to carry tidings to posterity that ever there was such a thing as Protestantism on the earth.