CHAPTER VI.
The Suffering Church
The first general persecutions in the Vaudois valleys in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Exhaustion and decay of the Church.
IT is related of Saturus of Carthage, one of the martyrs of pagan persecution, A.D. 202, that, condemned to fight with wild beasts in the amphitheatre, a leopard attacked him with such ferocity as to bathe him in the copious streams of blood that issued from the wound inflicted by its fangs, whereupon one of the spectators cried out, in derision, “He is baptized in his blood.” This sorrowful baptism has been applied as a type of the sufferings of the Christian Church during her three centuries of pagan persecution; and it did not lose its significance as afterwards carried out by her protesting children.
For many hundred years the Vaudois Church bent
