IN the dark ages, when Popery reigned all over Europe, the Waldenses held fast to the Gospel. And many an earnest preacher went forth from them to different countries, proclaiming to perishing sinners the unsearchable riches of Christ, From the first, persecution was their lot. Their chief dwelling-places were in some beautiful valleys in the north of Italy, where, in spite of all that was done against them, they continued faithful to the old Gospel, and to the simple form of government that had prevailed among them. During some hundreds of years these faithful people, with brief intervals of peace, were subjected to a series of the most terrible persecutions at the hands of the Dukes of Savoy, the Princes of Piedmont, or the Kings of France. Again and again decrees of extirpation were issued against this unoffending people, the agents of intolerance coming in overwhelming numbers, and with instructions to spare neither young nor old, neither man nor maiden, but to cut off root and branch ... . Every form of suffering which a devilish ingenuity could devise was inflicted on those brave confessors, whose one offense was their assertion of the rights of conscience and their claim to liberty of worship.
One of the most dreadful of their persecutions was in if, when Oliver Cromwell interposed, and sent liberal contributions for the relief of the sufferers. His young secretary, the poet Milton, wrote, in connection with this, his well-known sonnet
“Avenge, O Lord! Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept
Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Forget not; in Thy book record their groans,
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven.
Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who, having learned thy ways,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.”
God has preserved the descendants of these people to our own day. They inhabit seventeen parishes in the valleys of the Cottian Alps, and still cling to the faith and the Church of their fathers. Of late years, since Italy became open to the. Gospel, they have been trying very earnestly to spread the truth over the whole of it, and at Rome itself.