The moderator, Léger, foreseeing, with too sure prognostic, the coming storm of 1655, collected these original manuscripts of his Church, bearing date from A.D. 1100[1] to A.D. 1230, and consigned them to the care of Sir Samuel Holland, the English ambassador, who deposited them in the library at Cambridge. Another, but smaller collection, was placed nearly at the same time by Léger himself in the public library at Geneva—a wise precaution, since, by some unaccountable carelessness or fraud, a considerable number of the Cambridge deposit are missing. These MSS. are for the most part in the Romaunt tongue, a corruption of which is the popular language of the valleys, and are written with considerable accuracy, and even elegance.
But the glory of the Vaudois literature is their “Noble Lesson,” a poem of considerable power and of pure evangelical sentiment, sufficiently explanatory of the horror these ancient Christians entertained of the doctrine of Mariolatry and saint worship, of the supremacy of the Pope, the idolatry of the mass, and other falsehoods of Papal invention. Besides a copy of this poem, still remaining, we believe, in the Dublin collection, we have seen a very perfect one in the Genevan library, laid up with the autographs and manuscripts of the celebrated Reformers, ecclesiastical and political, of the sixteenth century—a jewel in an appropriate casket.
The poem opens with an exhortation to repentance, founded on the belief prevalent amongst the early Christians, that after the Gospel had been preached a thousand years, Satan would be loosed, and the end of the world draw nigh (Rev. xx. 7). This refers the work to the latter part of the eleventh century (a date, indeed, expressly specified), and
- ↑ This date is questioned.
