. It is not true, as has sometimes been asserted, that they
have ever rejected the practice of infant baptism. They have prepared and
enjoined the use of a very sound and full catechism, in which the children
of the Waldenses are carefully instructed previous to their admission to
the Lord's table.

So far we have sketched the leading points in the creed of the Waldensian
Church. We now come to its organization. There seem to have been three
epochs, so to speak, in reference to this feature of its history. For some
eleven hundred years it remained as a portion of the universal and
primitive church, rejecting the encroachments of the papal power, and the
corruptions of Christian doctrine which that power imposed, not by
authoritative enactments so much as by irregular influences, upon the
greater part of the Western Church. During this time the church in the
valleys of Piedmont retained that system of church government and worship
which had been accepted by most, if not all, sections of the Christian
Church in the third and fourth centuries. It was, therefore, during this
period that the Waldensian Church enjoyed the privilege of that episcopacy
which she never rejected as a matter of principle, but became deprived of
by circumstances which gave her no choice. In proof of this I refer to that
passage in the letter of Jerome to Riparius respecting Vigilantius, whose
zealous and persevering opposition to the worship of saints, images, and
relics, &c., had greatly provoked the irascible monk of Bethlehem. "I saw
(says Jerome) a short time ago that monster Vigilantius. I would fain have
bound this madman by passages of Holy Writ, as Hippocrates advises to
confine maniacs with bonds; but he has departed, he has withdrawn, he has
hurried away, he has escaped, and from the space between the Alps, _where
Cottius reigned_,[B] and the waves of the Adriatic, his cries have reached
me. Oh, infamous! he has found _even among the bishops_ accomplices of his
wickedness."

Here then we learn that in the country inhabited by the Waldenses there
were bishops opposing the corruption and contending for the priests of the
Christian faith. Nor was this confined even to Northern Italy; for we learn
that two centuries later Gregory the Great, who was pope from A.D. 590 to
604, censures Seremius, bishop of Marseilles, for not only forbidding the
adoration of images (which Gregory says he would have commended), but for
actually destroying the ima