e
distributed in thirteen or fourteen prison fortresses. Husbands were
separated from their wives, parents from their children, some two thousand
children being placed among papists for the purposes of perversion. These
were chiefly sent to the district of Vercelli, in Piedmont. And thus the
church of Rome won a triumph even more complete than her sanguinary labours
in the low countries. She had now silenced the gospel in Italy. That pure
flame in the valleys of Piedmont no longer shone amidst the darkness.
Those pious mountaineers no longer sang their psalms by hill-side, nor
offered the worship of a free heart in their lowly dells. The pure morals
of those shepherds and vine-dressers no longer rebuked the foul
licentiousness which flourished amid the benedictions of Santa Chiesa,
provided heretics were exterminated. That gospel which apostles taught, and
Rome once received, was no longer heard from the lips of pastors who
disdain the polluting touch of hands more able to confer the gifts of Simon
Magus than those of Simon Peter.

But yet these children of a pure faith are not conquered. They leave their
homes in the months of November, December, and February. Hundreds perish by
the way. How could it be otherwise? At that season of the year, and after
the treatment they had received in the dungeons in which they had groaned,
even strong men would have shrank from crossing the Alps, to say nothing of
the aged women and young children. Alas! O Rome, thy tender mercies are
cruel! The Swiss Protestants did nobly to soften the horrors of the
treatment awarded to their suffering co-religionists. They not only
remonstrated at the Court of Turin, but provided clothing and food to
assist the sufferers; they kept a solemn fast-day; they made collections;
they stationed themselves, by the consent of the Piedmontese authorities
(let it be said), at various places along the route. So by the end of
February, 1687, some two thousand six hundred Vaudois, men, women, and
children, were received within the hospitable walls of the city of Geneva.
Afterwards their numbers reached three thousand, and these were all that
remained out of a population of about sixteen thousand, dragged or driven
from the valleys. Nine pastors had been imprisoned in the citadel of Turin
with their families, and although their liberation was earnestly asked for
by the Swiss commissioners, it does not appear that they were ever allowed
to join their exiled brethr