ly--Two-fold Mission of Italy--Origin of the Vaudois--Evidence
of Romanist Historians--Evidence of their own Historians--Evidence
arising from the Noble Leycon from their Geographical
Position--Grandeur of the Vaudois Annals--Their Martyr Age--Their
Missionary Efforts--Present
Condition--Population--Churches--Schools--Stipends--Students--Social
and Moral Superiority--Political and Social Disabilities--The Year
1848 their Exodus--Their Mission--A Sabbath in the Vaudois
Sanctuary--Anecdote--Lesson Taught by their History.

How often during the long night must the Vaudois have looked from their
mountain asylum upon a world engulphed in error, with the mingled wonder
and dismay with which we may imagine the antediluvian fathers gazing
from the window of their ark upon the bosom of the shoreless flood! What
an appalling and mysterious dispensation! The fountains of the great
deep had a second time been broken up, and each successive century saw
the waters rising. Would Christianity ever re-appear? Or had the Church
completed her triumphs, and finished her course? And was time to close
upon a world shrouded in darkness, with nought but this feeble beacon
burning amid the Alps? Such were the questions which must often have
pressed upon the minds of the Vaudois.

Like Noah, too, they sent forth, from time to time, messengers from
their ark, to go hither and thither, and see if yet there remained
anywhere, in any part of the earth, any worshippers of the true God.
They returned to their mountain hold, with the sorrowful tidings that
nowhere had they found any remnant of the true Church, and that the
whole world wondered after the beast. The Vaudois, however, had power
given them to maintain their testimony. In the midst of universal
apostacy, and in the face of the most terrible persecutions, they bore
witness against Rome. And ever as that Church added another error to her
creed, the Vaudois added another article to their testimony; and in this
way Romish idolatry and gospel truth were developed by equal stages, and
an adequate testimony was maintained all through that gloomy period. The
stars of the ecclesiastical firmament fell unto the earth, like the
untimely figs of the fig-tree; but the lamp of the Alps went not out.
The Vaudois, not unconscious of their sacred office, watched their
heaven-kindled beacon with the vigilance of men inspired by the hope
that it would yet attract the