dois and Italy, that that Church
experienced lately a revival. That revival was almost immediately
followed by the boon of political and social emancipation, and by a new
and enlarged sphere of spiritual action. The year 1848 opened the doors
of their ancient prison, and called them to go forth and evangelize.
Formerly, all attempts to extend themselves beyond their mountain abode,
and to mingle with the nations around them, were uniformly followed by
disaster. The time was not come; and the integrity of their faith, and
the accomplishment of their high mission, would have been perilled by
their leaving their asylum. But when the revolutions of 1848 threw the
north of Italy open to their action, then came forth the decree of
Charles Albert, declaring the Vaudois free subjects of Piedmont, and the
Church of "the Valleys" a free Church. The disabilities under which the
Waldenses groaned up till this very recent period may well astonish us,
now that we look back to them. Up till 1848 the Waldensian was
proscribed, in both his civil and religious rights, beyond the limits of
his own valleys. Out of his special territory he dared not possess a
foot-breadth of land; and, if obliged to sell his paternal fields to a
stranger, he could not buy them back again. He was shut out from the
colleges of his country; he could not practise as a member of any of the
learned professions; every avenue to distinction and wealth was closed
against him,--his only crime being his religion. He could not marry but
with one of his own people; he could not build a sanctuary,--he could
not even bury his dead,--beyond the limits of "the Valleys." The
children were often taken away and trained in the idolatrous rites of
Romanism, and the unhappy parents had no remedy. They were slandered,
too, to their sovereigns, as men marked by hideous deformities; and
great was the surprise of Charles Albert to find, on a visit he paid to
the Valleys but a little before granting their emancipation, that the
Vaudois were not the monsters he had been taught to believe. I have been
told, that to this very day they carry their dead to the grave in open
coffins, to give ocular demonstration of the falsehood of the calumnies
propagated by their enemies, that the corpses of these heretics are
sometimes consumed by invisible flames, or carried off by evil spirits
before burial. But now all these disabilities are at an end. The year
1848 swept them all away; and a bulwark of