slightest proof that it originated in the twelfth century; though we know it to have then existed, and to have been received among the Vallenses; and it will perhaps be difficult to account for its general admission by the ancient churches, except on the natural principle, that it had been regularly handed down from the very time of their commencement.

(2.) The narrative itself contains nothing that is either intrinsically improbable, or extrinsically abhorrent, from the manners, and habits, and sentiments of the Vallenses.

One of the constant charges preferred against them, and by no person more sedulously and more bitterly than the Bishop of Meaux, was that of an ambitious ostentation of ecclesiastical poverty.* This, in every age, is confessed to have been alike their principle and their characteristic. Now, with such a principle and such a characteristic, the narrative perfectly accords. It simply exhibits their forefathers, as thinking and acting precisely in the same manner as the Vallenses themselves are known to have always thought and acted. Hence it seems to carry upon its very face the stamp of general authenticity.

(3.) In regard to chronology, the narrative fully harmonizes with those popish testimonies themselves which were borne in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

We have already seen, that at that period the Romanists, so far from making Peter of Lyons the founder of the Vallenses and the Albigenses, constantly represent them as sects characterized by a most remote antiquity—an antiquity so remote, that even then it was confessed to reach beyond the utmost memory of man. This is the unvaried language of the Romanists, who flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and, from their language, I laid it down as a principle, that no account of the origin of the Vallenses and Albigenses could be admitted, which should contradict these attestations to the acknowledged remoteness of their antiquity.

Now, with this obvious and necessary principle, the narrative before us perfectly agrees. The Romanists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries confess, that the Vallenses and Albigenses had even then existed from a period far beyond the memory of man; the statement of these religionists themselves declares, that they originated as a separate society in the time of Pope Sylvester, or in the earlier half of the fourth century.

6. Such are the grounds, on which I scruple not to receive the narrative in all its grand outlines, whatever may be thought of certain subordinate particulars.

The founder of the Vallenses, for instance, in their state of a separate communion, may very possibly have never been a companion of Pope Sylvester; and I think it indisputable, that the allegation of his bearing the name of Leon, which in the sixteenth century is said to have formed a part of the narrative, is a mere

Hist. des Variat. livr. xi. §. 71, 72, 73, 82, 83, 88.

modern figment, superadded by the vulgar for the purpose of accounting for the appellation of Leonists, which, in the time of Reinerius, was borne by the united Vallenses and Albigenses, and which has clearly been borrowed from the town of Lyons.* But these matters are mere supplemental excrescences, which, without affecting the general purport of the narrative, may be admitted or rejected at pleasure. The naked unadorned fact, which I am willing to receive, is this.

In the time of Pope Sylvester, when an already declining church was rendered yet more corrupt by the arrangements of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, t the simple and unconta minated inhabitants of the Alpine valleys of Dauphiny and Piedmont, offended by the growing superstition of the age, and disgusted (as the narrative states) at the avaricious secularity of Sylvester, quietly and unobservedly, in their mountain fastnesses, withdrew themselves from the commuuion of a church, which they deemed apostatic, and in the already gorgeous head of which, they recognized the predicted features of St. Paul's man of sin.

7. This I take to have been the naked fact; and it is a fact which accords both with the general character of mountaineers, and with the actual state of the church in the fourth century.

(1.) When, in the eighth century, the Roman world had fallen into the miserable superstition of image-worship, the person who strenuously opposed this odious and unscriptural corruption, was the Emperor Leo Isauricus. In his unsophisticated native mountains, the practice had as yet obtained no footing; and Leo, at Constantinople, was shocked and surprised to find a system of idolatry, so utterly unlike that primitive and simple form of Chris- · tianity to which he and his fathers had been accustomed. Such were the natural feelings of this iconoclastic sovereign; and the important consequences to which they led, I need not at present particularize. Now, unless I greatly mistake, the unchanging character of the secluded Alpine mountaineers is faithfully reflected in the similarly unchanging character of the mountaineers of Isauria. The inhabitants of the richer provinces of the Roman Empire gradually apostatised from the sincerity of the Gospel; the very character of their country was, in the hand of God, the secondary cause which led the sequestered Vallenses to persevere in the unadulterated faith of the primitive Apostolic church.

(2.) It will be recollected, that the founders of the separated Vallensic communions are said to have been peculiarly offended at the superstitious veneration of the cross; whence they pronounced it to be the mark of the apocalyptic wild-beast, and the abomination standing in the holy place.

• The name of Leon occurs in the narrative, as detailed in the sixteenth century by Claude Seissel of Turin. See Hist. des variat. livr, xi. §. 124.

† Eusebius mentions, that an interested and hypocritical profession of Christianity was one of the great evils of the time of Constantine, Euseb. de vita Constant. lib.. v. c. 54.

About the middle of that age, Julian directly charged the great body of professing Christians with adoring the material timber of the cross. The bulk of the imperial apostate's work has been pre served and answered by Cyril of Alexandria, who flourished in the fifth century. How then does the learned Patriarch meet the allegation of the taunting Emperor? Truly he ventures not to hazard a denial. You Christians adore the timber of the cross, says Julian, who, having himself been once a Christian, well knew the doctrines and practices of the age. What if we do adore the cross, replies Cyril, we had better do that than read lectures on Pagan mythology. Here we have a plain acknowledgment, that the Emperor's charge was perfectly accurate. The Christians of the fourth century idolatrously worshipped the cross, these pious separatists, who could no longer conscientiously hold communion with a church so fallen, pronounced the cross, when thus horribly profaned, to be the very mark of the wild-beast, and the abomination standing in the holy place.

*

This alleged circumstance exactly accords with the state of the corrupted church in the fourth century.

8. The assertion, that the Vallenses had existed from the time of Pope Sylvester, will explain the concomitant assertion, that they had existed also from the time of the Apostles.

As a church, separated by the good providence of God from a now corrupt church general, for the purpose of holding his pure word through a long and dreary period of apostatic error, the Vallenses could claim no higher antiquity than the age of Sylvester: but, as descendants of men who had been members of churches founded by the Apostles, they might under this aspect claim even an apostolic antiquity. Their ancestors, I take it, communicated with the church general, so long as they could do it with a safe conscience. But, when the increase of unscriptural superstition rendered such communion no longer honestly possible to the scrupulous and unchanging mountaineers of the Alps, they forthwith, agreeably to the Apocalyptic warning, came out of the mystic Babylon, that they might not be partakers of her sins, and that they might not receive of her plagues.*

Such an account of the matter strikes upon my own mind, both as perfectly natural, and as fully accordant with all those testimonies respecting the ancient Vallenses and Albigenses, which have come down to us from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

SECTION VI.

Summary and Conclusion.

The preceding remarks are, I trust, fully sufficient to extract its sting from the very plausible, though very sophistical, argument of the learned Bishop of Meaux.

* Cyril. Alex. cont. Julian. lib. vi. p. 194-198.

+ Rev. xviii, 4.

8

I. Agreeably to the promise of our Saviour Christ, there has never been wanting, from the earliest ages, a sincere visible church. Through all the worst and the darkest ages, even through that which Baronius himself calls the iron, and the leaden and the obscure age, such a church has incessantly existed, though often, to all appearance, on the very brink of destruction.* There was a time, when, in the boasted immutable communion of the Latins, religious knowledge was at so low an ebb, that the Cardinal, during the period of his leaden age, is fain to pronounce Christ himself asleep, while the ship of the church catholic was overwhelmed by the waves: and, what he thinks even yet worse than the alledged somnolency of the omniscient Redeemer, the ecclesiastical mariners snored so loudly, that disciples who might rouse their sleeping Lord, were no where to be found. He, however, that keepeth Israel, neither slumbered nor slept. Profound as might be the drowsiness of the universal Latin church, respecting which Baronius so justly and so honestly complains, Christ, nevertheless, was not without mariners both fully awake, and zealously active at their post. What the cardinal was unable to find throughout the vast obscure of the Papal dominions, still continued to exist in the secluded and despised valleys of Dauphiny and Piedmont.

II. For a long period this sincere church consisted of two distinct, though harmoniously symbolizing branches; but, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the broken remnant of the ancient Albigensic church united itself to, and was thence permanently absorbed by the ancient church of the Vallenses.

III. Thus acting as faithful witnesses to genuine primitive Christianity, the two venerable, and at length united churches of the Vallenses and the Albigenses did not rest content with passive inactivity. The records of Popery abound with complaints of their zealous spirit of proselytism; and, in truth, long before the glorious era of the Reformation, they had shot forth their boughs into Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary. Though incessantly harassed and persecuted by the Romanists, yet, through all those middle ages which preceded the Reformation of the sixteenth century, they were never either utterly exterminated by the sword of violence, or enslaved to the unhallowed superstition of the Latin church. According to the remarkable confession of Claude Seissel, Archbishop of Turin, all sorts of people have several times vainly endeavoured to root them out, yet, contrary to general expectation, they have still continued conquerors, or at least they have been wholly invincible. Reformed

• En novum inchoatur sæculum, quod, sua asperitate ac boni sterilitate ferreum, malique exundantis deformitate plumbeum, atque inopia scriptorum appellari consuevit obscurum. Baron. Annal. in A. D. 900.

+ Dormiebat tunc plane alto (ut apparet) sopore Christus, cum navis fluctibus operiretur: et, quod deterius videbatur, deerant qui Dominum sic dormientem clamoribus excitarent discipili, stertentibus omnibus. Baron Annal. in A. D. 912. Seissel. Tractat. adv. Vald. fol. 1. cited by Allix.

churches, in the legitimate sense of the word reformed, they are not: and high is their praise, and venerable is their privilege, that they bear no such inferior character. These two faithful witnessing churches, which have thus been specially made the honoured instruments of fulfilling Christ's gracious promise of a sincere visible perpetuity, and which still subsist unaltered in doctrine, though by systematic tyranny ground down to the lowest stage of depression: these two faithful communions are not reformed churches, simply because they never required reform

ation.

IV. With the Protestants of the nineteenth century, the visible united church of the Vallenses and the Albigenses, then actually existing in the valleys of Piedmont, agreed, both in all essential points of Scriptural doctrine, and in a steady opposition to the unseriptural corruptions of the church of Rome. Through the medium of the Valleusic church, we stand connected with the purity of the primitive church. In despite of the lawless innovations of the Papacy, innovations which are condemned by the testimony of the earliest ecclesiastical writers, the promise of Christ has been accomplished. A very subtle problem has been proposed by the Bishop of Meaux: that problem, I am willing to hope, has now been solved. In the valleys of the Alps, by a. visible church the ancient faith of Christianity has been preserved through all the middle ages of innovating superstition, pure and uncontaminated.

LETTERS ON THE CELIBACY OF THE ROMISH CLERGY.

Addressed to the Rev. J. B. of the Order of St. Francis.

AVENTINUS informs us, that marriage was common among the German clergy, of all degrees, from the earliest times till the pontificate of Gregory VII., in the eleventh century; and that clerical marriage was universally approved of and honoured in that part of Europe.* He cites the ancient records of grants made to churches and monasteries by married priests, and subscribed by their wives, as witnesses, under the denomination of Presbyterissa. Balaus and Bruschius, speak of the marriages of monks and nuns as not uncommon in Germany before the tenth century. The great synod convoked by the Emperor Charlemagne, in the year 742, chiefly for the purpose of regulating ecclesiastical government and discipline, and which is spoken of at large by Aventinus and Nauclerus,

• L. 5.