We not only find many colonies of these people in the eastern and western parts of Europe, but even in Africa and America, whither they emigrated to escape from oppression and massacre.
After the most cruel and wanton persecutions, we observe this oppressed people reduced in number by barbarous massacres, and at length driven out of their own purchased territories, because they would not submit to innovations and changes in their established religion; but in a few years we again find a remnant of them under their pastor, Henri Arnaud, led back into their native country almost in a miraculous manner to expel their savage oppressors, thousands of whom fled before this reduced but noble band of self-taught warriors.
Many refugees took up their abode in the Rhetian Alps, and a great number, after various edicts, were allowed to settle in the Duchy of Wirtemberg, where some of them were visited by the writer of these pages, for the express purpose of inquiring into their wants and privileges.
Before the days of Wickliffe, and other reformers, we can trace the Vaudois by their sufferings; they were branded and burnt as heretics, because they would not conform to the doctrines of men, and the edicts of the Roman pontiffs: their steady adherence to the principles of their own faith, and obedience to the will of their Creator, rendered them instrumental to the reformation, which afterwards took place, and by which, in this country, the pure religion of our ancestors was restored. It is even probable that this separated flock of true worshippers are to be the means, under heavenly guidance, of not only preserving, but also diffusing, the light of the gospel and its healing beams over the most remote parts of the earth.
251 A.D. It would appear that the title of Cathari, or "the Pure," was first given to the followers of Novation, a Romish pastor, who set the example of resisting the early corruptions of the Papal dominion, and that Puritan churches existed in Italy upwards of 200 years.
590 Nine Bishops rejected the communion of the Pope, as heretical, and this schism, we are told by another author, began even in the year 553.
604 On the death of Pope Gregory, Boniface III. styled himself "universal Bishop," and the worship of images became general; but long before this period, in the fourth century, Socrates the historian speaks of the Novations having churches at Constantinople, Nice, Nicomedia, and Coticæus in Phrygia, &c. as well as a church at Carthage, the doctrines and discipline of which, we find that Dionysius, Bishop of' Alexandria, and Fabius, Bishop of Antioch, approved of.
660 Some persons have supposed that the Valdenses have derived their name from Petro Valdo, but Reinerius Sacco, an inquisitor who lived 80 years after Valdo of Lyons, admits that they flourished 500 years before the time of this celebrated reformer, i. e. about the year 660. Some of these Valdenses, like the Novations, we find called Puritans, or Gathari; when Paulinus, Bishop of Aquilæia, and other Italian Bishops, condemned the decrees of the second Council of Nice, which had confirmed image worship.
817 Claude, Bishop of Turin, (and of the Vallies of Piedmont inhabited by the Valdenses,) was zealous against this idolatrous practice, and bears witness that the gospel was preserved amongst these mountaineers in its native purity and glorious light. Genebrand and Rorenco (Roman Catholic writers) have owned that the Patarines* and inhabitants of Piedmont preserved the opinions of Claude during the ninth and tenth centuries.
* Patarines, so called from Pataria, a place near Milan,
where those Vaudois who took part with the Bishop of Milan
against the Roman Pontiff, Nicholas II., held communion
together. See the Sermon of Archbishop Wake, preached for
the relief of the Vaudois, A.D. 1669, at St. James's
Westminster.