hild; Lares and Penates by images and crucifixes; while incense,
flowers, tapers, and showy dresses came to be regarded as essential
parts of the ceremonial of the new religion as they had been of the
old. Madonnas winked and bled again, as the statues of Juno and Pompey
had done before; and stones and relics worked miracles as in the time
of the Augurs.

[Footnote 92: The ancient Vaudois had a saying, known in
other countries--"Religion brought forth wealth, and the
daughter devoured the mother;" and another of like meaning,
but less known--"When the bishops' croziers became golden,
the bishops themselves became Wooden."]

Attempts were made by some of the early bishops to stem this tide of
innovation. Thus, in the fourth, century, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan,
and Philastrius, Bishop of Brescia, acknowledging no authority on
earth as superior to that of the Bible, protested against the
introduction of images in churches, which they held to be a return to
Paganism. Four centuries later, Claude, Bishop of Turin, advanced like
views, and opposed with energy the worship of images, which he
regarded as absolute idolatry. In the meanwhile, the simple Vaudois,
shut up in their almost inaccessible valleys, and knowing nothing of
these innovations, continued to adhere to their original primitive
form of worship; and it clearly appears, from a passage in the
writings of St. Ambrose, that, in his time, the superstitions which
prevailed elsewhere had not at all extended into the mountainous
regions of his diocese.

The Vaudois Church was never, in the ordinary sense of the word, a
"Reformed" Church, simply because it had not become corrupted, and did
not stand in need of "reformation." It was not the Vaudois who left
the Church, but the Roman Church that left them in search of idols.
Adhering to their primitive faith, they never recognised the paramount
authority of the Pope; they never worshipped images, nor used incense,
nor observed Mass; and when, in the course of time, these corruptions
became known to them, and they found that the Western Church had
ceased to be Catholic, and become merely Roman; they openly separated
from it, as being no longer in conformity with the principles of the
Gospel as inculcated in the Bible and delivered to them by their
fathers. Their ancient manuscripts, still extant, attest to the purity
of their doctrines. They are written, like the Nobla Leycon, i