ing could stop them, even to the forming of a new Church. They
multiplied with a rapidity hardly exceeded afterward by the Franciscans.
By the end of the twelfth century we find them spread abroad from
Hungary to Spain; the first attempts to hunt them down were made in the
latter country. Other countries were at first satisfied with treating
them as excommunicated persons.

Obliged to hide themselves, reduced to the impossibility of holding
their chapters, which ought to have come together once or twice a year,
and which, had they done so, might have maintained among them a certain
unity of doctrine, the Waldenses rapidly underwent a change according to
their environment; some obstinately insisting upon calling themselves
good Catholics, others going so far as to preach the overthrow of the
hierarchy and the uselessness of sacraments.[19] Hence that multiplicity
of differing and even hostile branches which seemed to develop almost
hourly.

A common persecution brought them nearer to the Cathari and favored the
fusion of their ideas. Their activity was inconceivable. Under pretext
of pilgrimages to Rome they were always on the road, simple and
insinuating. The methods of travel of that day were peculiarly favorable
to the diffusion of ideas. While retailing news to those whose
hospitality they received, they would speak of the unhappy state of the
Church and the reforms that were needed. Such conversations were a means
of apostleship much more efficacious than those of the present day, the
book and the newspaper; there is nothing like the _viva vox_[20] for
spreading thought.

Many vile stories have been told of the Waldenses; calumny is far too
facile a weapon not to tempt an adversary at bay. Thus they have been
charged with the same indecent promiscuities of which the early
Christians were accused. In reality their true strength was in their
virtues, which strongly contrasted with the vices of the clergy.

The most powerful and determined enemies of the Church were the Cathari.
Sincere, audacious, often learned and keen in argument, having among
them some choice spirits and men of great intellectual powers, they were
pre-eminently the heretics of the thirteenth century. Their revolt did
not bear upon points of detail and questions of discipline, like that of
the early Waldenses; it had a definite doctrinal basis, taking issue
with the whole body of Catholic dogma. But, although this heresy
flourished in Italy and