eyes of the world. At length--thrice
welcome sight!--the watch-fires of the German reformers, kindled at
their own, began to streak the horizon. They knew that the hour of
darkness had passed, and that the time was near when the Church would
leave her asylum, and go forth to sow the fields of the world with the
immortal seed of truth.

We must be permitted to remark here, that the fact that the Waldensian
territory is really a part of Italy, and that the Vaudois, or Valdesi,
or People of the Valleys (for all three signify the same thing), are
strictly an Italian people, invests ITALY with a new and interesting
light. In all ages, Pagan as well as Christian, Italy has been the seat
of a twofold influence,--the one destructive, the other regenerative. In
classic times, Italy sent forth armies to subjugate the world, and
letters to enlighten it. Since the Christian era, her mission has been
of the same mixed character. She has been at once the seat of idolatry
and the asylum of Christianity. Her idolatry is of a grosser and more
perfected type than was the worship of Baal of old; and her Christianity
possesses a more spiritual character, and a more powerfully operative
genius, than did the institute of Moses. We ought, then, to think of
Italy as the land of the martyr as well as of the persecutor,--as not
only the land whence our Popery has come, which has cost us so many
martyrs of whom we are proud, and has caused the loss of so many souls
which we mourn,--but also as the fountain of that blessed light which
broke mildly on the world in the preaching of John Huss, and more
powerfully, a century afterwards, in the reformation of the sixteenth
century. Though there was no audible voice, and no visible miracle, the
Waldenses were as really chosen to be the witnesses of God during the
long night of papal idolatry, as were the Jews to be his witnesses
during the night of pagan idolatry. They are sprung, according to the
more credible historical accounts, from the unfallen Church of Rome;
they are the direct lineal descendants of the primitive Christians of
Italy; they never bowed the knee to the modern Baal; their mountain
sanctuary has remained unpolluted by idolatrous rites; and if they were
called to affix to their testimony the seal of a cruel martyrdom, they
did not fall till they had scattered over the various countries of
Europe the seed of a future harvest. Their death was a martyrdom endured
in behalf of Christendom