g. This measure was forced upon the Waldenses by the cruelties to
which they were exposed in the South of France. Their earliest colonies
(A.D. 1340) were at Apulia and Calabria, and in Liguria. The lords of the
soil in Southern Italy permitted them to settle on favourable terms. They
built several towns, such as Oltromontani, grew in temporal prosperity, and
lived in peace for many years. As regards ecclesiastical matters, they
maintained direct communion with their brethren in the valleys, who
supplied them with pastors. These pastors, in their journeys backwards and
forwards, visited their faithful brethren scattered throughout Italy. The
barbes, indeed, possessed a house in each of the cities of Florence, Genoa,
and Venice. As regards numbers, it is not unlikely that the Waldenses in
Italy, France, and Germany at this time (the close of the fourteenth
century) were about eight hundred thousand. Venice alone contained six
thousand Vaudois, it is said, at this time. But this state of external
peacefulness continued only for a time. The very superiority of the Vaudois
to their neighbours attracted attention to their religious peculiarities.
The Romish clergy complained "that they did not live like other people in
matters of religion; that they made none of their children priests or nuns;
that they did not concern themselves about chants, wax tapers, lights,
bells, or even masses for the dead; that they had no images in their
temples," &c. All this criticism was intensified by the news of that great
reformation of the sixteenth century, which awakened alike the fears and
the rage of Rome, and sent forth her legionaries everywhere like
blood-hounds keenly on the scent for the tracks of heresy.

They were not long before they met with the evidences of a purer faith than
that of the pope's in the sunny regions south of the Tiber. The Waldenses
in Calabria had heard of the revived faith and growing zeal of their
brethren in Piedmont. They determined, like them, to lay aside all
concealment of their religious profession, and openly to proclaim their
heart-deep convictions as to the vital principles of the gospel of Christ.
As a means of a higher and truer confession of Christ, they sought a
colleague for their pastor, Etienne Negrin (who was from the valleys), from
Geneva. A young Piedmontese, Jean Louis Pascal, was just then finishing his
studies at Lausanne. Brought up as a papist and a soldier, he renounced his
former creed