hands, and applied themselves to some useful handicraft or art principally to that of healing. They were, for the most part, unmarried; not from deeming the state of wedlock forbidden, or otherwise undesirable than as a bar to usefulness, and more especially to that life of missionary labours to which these apostles of the valleys were from their earliest ordination devoted.
The Word of God was the earliest inheritance of the Vaudois, and they clung with a holy pertinacity to all that it bade them retain, renouncing with equal integrity all that could not be proved to be in accordance with its injunctions. The Bible was their sword and shield, their fortress and defence from the face of their enemies.
Deprived for centuries of an outward church, forced to meet for worship in caves and dens of the earth, the lamp of the Word was their only light, so that, guided by its unerring beams, their feet stumbled not on the dark mountains. Thus “a familiar acquaintance with the Bible, and submission to its teachings, formed the distinctive feature of the ancient Vaudois. Nor was the investigation of the Holy Scriptures the duty and privilege of the barbes and their scholars only the layman, the labourer, the artisan, the mountain cowherd, the mother of a family, nay, even the young girl whilst watching the cattle and employing her hands at the same time in spinning, studied the Bible attentively and practically.” [1]
This faithful investigation of the Word of God naturally exercised a powerful influence on the writers of the ancient documents of the Vaudois Church, which are still preserved, and of which scriptural truth and scriptural simplicity are the prominent characteristics.
- ↑ Monastier’s Histoire de l’Eglise Vaudoise, chap. xii.
