WALDENSES (Waldensians), The, Sylvester Hassell About the year 1400, in the depths of winter, the Catholics committed great depredations upon the Waldenses who inhabited the valley of Pragela in Piedmont. About 1460 the Inquisition preyed cruelly upon the Waldenses in the Fernch valleys of Fraissiniere, Argentiere and Loyse—the poor and peaceful lovers of truth fleeing with their children and valuables to the tops of the mountains and hiding in caves. Their merciless enemies placed large quantities of wood at the entrances of the caves and set it on fire, and suffocated, it is said, four hundred children in their cradles or in the arms of their dead mothers; while multitudes, to avoid suffocation, leaped down upon the rocks below, and were either dashed to pieces or immediately slaughtered by the brutal soldiery. All the inhabitants of the valley of Loyse, three thousand, are said to have perished in this campaign.
In 1488 an army of eighteen thousand Catholics made war upon the Waldenses of Piedmont, who, at length losing their patience, and departing from the peaceful principles of their ancestors, armed themselves with wooden targets and cross-bows, and for a while fought in defense of their wives and children, everywhere defending the defiles of their mountains, and repelling the invaders. Some were driven by fear from public to private worship; and other conformed to Catholicism.. Evidence henceforth increase of a degeneracy from their primitive purity of faith and practice.” (Hassell’s History ppg 468, 469)
The Waldenses, it is held by many of the most learned authorities, were so called from Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, who about 1160 expended his wealth in giving alms to the poor, and in translating and distributing the Scriptures. His followers were called Poor Men of Lyons, or Leonists, or Sabbatati (from their wooden shoes), or Humiliati, the Downtrodden; also Waldenses, Vallenses, or Vaudois—the latter name being supposed to have been derived from the valleys of Piedmont, in Northwest Italy, where these lovers and students and adherents of the written word of God abounded. When driven by Catholic persecution from France, Peter Waldo fled to Piedmont, and afterwards to Bohemia in Germany, where he is said to have died in 1179.
As in the case of the primitive church, persecution disseminated the truth until it was found in nearly all the countries of Europe. The Waldenses were very industrious, honest, modest, frugal, chaste, and temperate, according to the universal testimony of their Catholic enemies. They held the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the only standard of faith and practice; and they consequently rejected the authority of the “fathers” and the Catholic traditions, and the doctrines of purgatory, indulgences, and transubstantiation, monasticism, sacramentalism and celibacy. They held that there were only two Christian ordinances, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and that these were but emblems and signs of inward grace.
They were very familiar with the Scriptures, very many of them being able to repeat entire books of the Bible from memory. They condemned all taking of oaths, shedding of blood, capital punishment, and military service. The “Church of Rome” they declared it be the “whore of Babylon.” They maintained the universal priesthood of believers, and they allowed all their members, both male and female, to preach and administer the ordinances; their preachers worked with their own hands for their necessities. They taught that God alone can forgive sin. Some practiced infant baptism, and some did not; they who did baptize infants probably had been Catholics, and thus retained that unscriptural and traditional error.
The earliest Waldenses were not established in the doctrine of predestination, and of the redemptive work of Christ, and of our full and free justification by faith in Him; their prevailing type of doctrine is less that of Paul than of James. In the darkness of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were more Arminian than Augustinian in their views. They were babes in Christ, and were gradually led into the doctrine of grace.
It is highly probable, and is believed by many eminent historians, that the Waldenses in Northern Italy were the spiritual descendants and successors of the Novatians—then stigmatized as Anabaptists, rejecting the superstitions and corruptions of Rome, and re-immersing all who joined them from the Catholic communion.” (Hassell’s History ppg 440, 441)
Even “Cardinal” Hosius, chairman of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, testifies not only to the existence, but also to the persecutions and cheerful sufferings of the “Anabaptists” ever since the fourth century, when Constantine connected Church and state, and the people of God protested against the unholy and corrupting alliance, and were persecuted by the Second Beast.
Ludwig Keller, the present royal archivist at Munster, has mastered, more completely than any other man, the printed and manuscript sources of early Baptist history. In his book, Die Reformation and die alteren Reformparteien, in ihrem Zusammenhang dargestellt ( The Reformation and the Older Reforming Parties, Exhibited in their Connection), published at Leipzig, by Hirzel, in 1885, Keller proves that, while the Lutherans and Zwinglians were new sects, the churches of the so-called Anabaptists, or Baptists of the sixteenth century, were but the renewal or continuation of the Petrobrusian and Waldensian churches of the twelfth century; and he gives strong reasons for accepting the old Walsensians tradition of a succession of evangelical churches from the time of the union of “Church” and State (under Pope Sylvester I. and the Emperor Constantine), and so from the time of the apostles.
While no Scripture, properly interpreted, requires that we should find at all times all of the elements of Christianity represented in any one Christian community, no Baptist can be indifferent to facts which seem to prove the persistence of apostolic teaching and practice, in a form more or less pure, throughout the centuries of ecclesiastical corruption.
The Waldenses, of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, repudiated the idea of derivation from Peter Waldo, and insisted with the utmost decision upon direct apostolic derivation. Except when restrained by temporal power, they practiced believers’ baptism.
In the latter part of the twelfth century the popes and councils pronounced repeated excommunications and anathemas against the Albigensians and Waldenses; affirmed the right of the church to banish them, confiscate their property and put them to death; and even ordered the temporal sovereigns, under the strong temptations of possessing the confiscated estates and of receiving indulgences, to carry these penalties into effect.” (Hassell’s History ppg 440, 441)