When Waldo fled, his disciples followed him. The dispersion took place similarly to that which arose on the occasion of Stephen's persecution. The effects were also similar; the blessed gospel was more widely disseminated throughout Europe. Their great strength was their possession of the sacred scriptures in their own language. They read the Gospels; they preached and they prayed in the vulgar tongue. Many of them, no doubt, found their way to the valleys of Piedmont and the cities of Languedoc. A new translation of the Bible was doubtless a rich accession to the spiritual treasures of that interesting people.
The scene was now ready for Pope Innocent: the papal threatenings having been transmitted to his vigorous hand, were executed with a willing and unrelenting mind. He who had humbled the great kings of Germany, France, and England, and had received implicit submission from almost every part of Christendom, was still disowned as supreme head of the church by the Waldenses wherever they were found. It was not likely that such a spirit as Innocent's would continue to endure with calmness this resistance to his boasted universal supremacy. But what was their crime? where were they to be found? and how were they to be dealt with?
1. They had the highest reputation everywhere, even from their worst enemies, for modesty, frugality, honest industry, chastity, and temperance. "In no instance," says a high authority, but not very favorable to what he calls the antisacerdotalists, "are the morals of Peter Waldo and the Alpine Bible-Christians arraigned by their bitterest foes." Their mortal sin was found in their appeal to the scriptures, and to the scriptures alone, in all matters of faith and worship. They rejected the vast system of tradition-religion, as maintained by the church of Rome. Both in life and in doctrine they were noble witnesses for Christ and the simplicity of the gospel; but they formed a powerful protest against the wealth, the power, and the superstitions of the dominant religion. They rejected the almost innumerable sacraments of Rome, and maintained that there were only two in the New Testament—baptism and the Lord's supper. In general we may say that they anticipated and held the same doctrines which, after the lapse of three centuries, were to be promulgated by the Reformers of Germany and England, and which form the creed of Protestants at the present time.
2. The progress of "the poor men of Lyons," after their persecutions, appears to have been rapid, and widely extended. They spread abroad, we are told, into the south of France, into Lombardy, and into Arragon. "In Lombardy and Provence," says Robertson, "the Waldenses had more schools than the Catholics; their preachers disputed and taught publicly, while the number and importance of the patrons whom they had gained, rendered it dangerous to interfere with them. In Germany they had forty-one schools in the diocese of Passau, and they were numerous in the dioceses of Metz and Toul. From England to the south of Italy, from the Hellespont to the Ebro, their opinions were widely spread."
3. Such was the state of things on the accession of Pope Innocent III. With anxious forebodings, and a far-seeing eye, he watched this spirit of religious independence, but how to crush it effectually was the question. Besides, at that time, as the reader will remember, his hands were full. He was seeking to destroy the balance of power in Germany and Italy, he was contending with the kings of France and England by turns, he was directing the march of the Crusaders, and overturning by their means the Greek empire at Constantinople; yet was he watching, and determined to punish every dissent from the tenets of the church of Rome, and every exercise of the thinking faculty on religious subjects. It was loudly rumored about this time that the two principal seats of this disaffection towards Rome were the valleys of Piedmont and the south of France. The Piedmontese Christians flourished in comparative obscurity, while the Albigenses were rendered more notorious, as well as more dangerous, by the protection afforded them in the wealthy cities of Languedoc. Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse, not only favored those of the Waldensian creed as the best of his subjects, but employed them in his family, though avowedly himself a Roman Catholic. The Count of Foix was married to a Waldensian; of his two sisters, one was said to be a Waldensian, and the other a catharist, or puritan.