The Holy Scripture - english version B.indd - Sabbat

Pre-Reformation Interpreters.329these early reformers was reduced to the silence of the sepulchre.Thus began the tremendous war against the sainst foretold in Daniel and theApocalypse, and thenceforward it was murderously prosecuted from century tocentury. Early in the thirteenth century was founded the Inquisition, and fullpersecuting powers entrusted by the popes to the Dominicans.A remnant of the Vaudois escaping from the south of France took refuge in theAlps, where the light of the Gospel had been preserved from the earliest times.I have visited the Waldensian valleys, and will try in a few words to bring thembefore you.You doubtless remember the position of the city of Milan on the plain ofLombardy. From the top of the famous cathedral of Milan there is a magnificentview of the southers Alps. The plains of Lombardy and Piedmont extend to theirbase. The Alps are seen stretching to the east and west, as far as the eye can reach.The sun at noon falls full upon their crowded peaks. There they stand in rugged,wild sublimity, their lower slopes mantled with dark forests, their summitscrowned with glaciers and eternal snows.To the west, among these, beyond the city of Turin, rises the vast white comeof Monto Viso. Among the mountains at its base lie the Waldensian valleys. Theyare five in number, and run up into narrow, elevated gorges, winding among fircladsteeps, and climbing into the region of the clouds, which hover round theicy, alpine peaks. These valleys were the refuge of the „Israel of the Alps.“Protestants long before the Reformation, these noble mountaineers resolutelyrefused to bow the knee to Baal; they were a faithful remnat of the earlyChurch preserved all through the central ages of apostasy.This folio volume is a faithful history of the Waldenses, written 217 ago, bythe Waldensian pastor Leger. It contains his portrait. I have often looked at itwith interest. The countenance is scarred with suffering, but full of spiritual light.Leger tells with simple clearness the story of the Waldenses from the earliesttimes, quoting from ancient and authentic documents. He gives in full theirconfession of faith, and narrates the history of their martyrdoms, including thedreadful massacre in the vale of Lucerna, in 1655, of which he himself wasan eye-witness. This book was written only fourteen years after that massacre.It contains numerous despositions concerning it, rendered on oath, and longlists of the names of those who were its victims. It gives also plates depictingthe dreadful ways in which they were slaughtered. These plates represent men,women, and children being dismembered, disemboweled, ripped up, run throughwith swords, impaled on stakes, torn limb from limb, flung from precipices,roasted in flames. They are almost too horrible to look at. And this was only oneof a long series of massacres of the Waldenses extending through 600 painfulyears. Milton wrote of these Protestant sufferers his immortal sonnet:„Avenge, O Lord, Your slaughtered saints, whose bonesLie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;Even them who kept Your truth so pure of old,When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,Forget not: in Your book record their groans