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long-deserted homes, and engaged to wear crosses on their garments in sign of penitence. But when the soldiery were withdrawn, and only Priests remained to occupy the churches, the penitential crosses were laid aside, mass was deserted, Waldensian worship was again performed, and the report reached Rome that the crusade had been ineffectual, after all. An army of eighteen thousand men was then collected, and with a multitude of volunteer crusaders rushed into the country. But as the fugitive inhabitants dispersed, the force was broken into small companies; and when those companies had wandered over the valleys for about a year, subsisting on plunder, the Duke of Savoy, weary of the affair, interposed his influence, and obtained peace for his persecuted subjects. He even yielded to an impulse of compassion, and pleaded in their favour; and when Vaudois fathers brought their children into his presence to prove that the offspring of heretics were not monsters, as the Priests had told him, he encouraged the infants to approach, returned their smiles, and bade the men go home, and be assured of liberty and protection. But in those days Princes had little power: the promises of the Duke were set at nought by the Inquisitors, who again and again brought crusaders to spread burning and bloodshed through Piedmont; until the Waldenses, finding human succour to be in vain, cast themselves on the help of God, ran to arms, repelled and overcame the enemy, and their descendants occupied the country without suffering invasion, for another hundred years. Thus did the Head of the church preserve his witnesses hereafter to unite in the glorious labours of the Protestant Reformation.*

As if to maintain by terror an authority which Rome could no longer exercise by any other means, the Inquisition failed not to commit heretics to the flames in almost every country of Europe; or Bishops, acting as Inquisitors, where that tribunal was not estab lished, did the same. No doubt many of the victims were fanatics, mere revolters against the Clergy, political offenders, or objects of private hatred. The poverty of history, and the malice of the murderers, leaves them in obscurity; and, after having related the sufferings of the Waldenses of Piedmont, and promised to relate the revival of religion in England by means of Wycliffe, little remains to be narrated here; except, indeed, as regards the Waldensian emigrants, who were everywhere pursued by the common enemy of all righteousness. The "fourteen men and women " whom Limborch, on the authority of Bzovius, briefly states to have been burnt in Bohemia, were probably Waldenses; and Walter, burnt at Cologne, (A.D. 1322,) is described as Chief of the sect of Lollards, or praying people.+ By sentence of a Council holden at Mentz, (A.D. 1387,) thirty-six citizens of that city, convicted of the Waldensian heresy, were burned to death at Bingen, a town on the Rhine, between Mentz and Coblentz. They declared that the Pope was Antichrist; and if they died in the faith of Christ, like many of their brethren in the Alps, they are worthily numbered with the mar*Morland, book ii., chap. 1. + Limborch, Inquisition, chap. 18.

Foxe, Acts and Monuments, book v., anno 1370.

THE PLOUGHMAN'S COMPLAINT."

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tyrs' host. In the diocess and province of Embrun, in Dauphiny, there was "a great multitude of persons" who held the same doctrine as the Christians of Piedmont, and spread their tenets among the population. A Papal Bull was issued, requiring all Bishops, Abbots, and Clergy, the Lords, Judges, and communities, to aid the Inquisitor in cleansing that and the neighbouring provinces from the taint of heresy. Such Bulls were not usually issued until the probability that they would be executed had been ascertained; and we may therefore take it for granted that many perished in the flames, or were slaughtered by the soldiery of the Sovereigns of France and Naples, to whom also letters were addressed.* But the affairs of England now demand our most careful observation.

Although the evangelical doctrines of the Waldenses made little progress in this country at the time when those who entertained them were most numerous, and while they suffered severest persecution on the Continent, the imperishable seed of revealed truth had not lost its vitality. From the days of Aldhelm,† Englishmen had heard the word of God in Anglo-Saxon versions: long after the Norman conquest that language was but an antiquated form of the vernacular; and it must not be inferred that England had no knowledge of the holy Scriptures, because an interval of nearly three hundred years may have elapsed between the recorded dates of the last Anglo-Saxon and the first English translation. The former had not. ceased to be intelligible when the latter appeared; and, independently of those works, there were earnest Preachers, and writers too, who quoted Scripture largely in the language of the people. Perhaps it is owing to this fact, under the gracious care of God, that the doctrines of our early Reformers were so near the standard by which we estimate doctrine at this day. Early in the fourteenth century ‡ an anonymous tract was circulated, bearing the title of "the Ploughman's Complaint." The document is intrinsically good, and sufficiently full to afford material for a judgment of the state of religious opinion in England at the time of its composition. Whoever the writer was, he must have been a well-informed and active opponent of the prevailing superstition, and of the pretensions of the Pope, then so unpopular in this island; for, speaking of Papal wars and curses, he observes : "Of what thing that I knowe, I may beare true witnesse." Personating a ploughman, he may be presumed to represent the sentiments entertained by many in the humbler classes of society, with whom he entirely agreed in expounding an evangelical precept to require "poorenes in spirite; but not to ben a begger," referring to the swarms of begging Friars who had risen into popularity by the profession of poverty, and then become hateful for inordinate love *Fleury, xcvi., 10.

† About the year 706.

Foxe dates this work at 1360; but conjecturally. He altered "not many words of the phrase thereof," to make it more intelligible in his day; but even after this alteration, which extended to the more antiquated words, and therefore despoils it of some of its antiquity, the style is evidently more ancient, far more strongly Saxon, than that of Wycliffe, whose Bible is dated "about 1378." "The Ploughman's Complaint," therefore, presents a highly important example of English quotation and practical use of Scripture many years before Wycliffe.

of wealth and luxury. Like the author of "the Noble Lesson," the Ploughman gives a compendium of some chief points of sacred history, and passes by the Fathers and other ecclesiastical authorities without the slightest notice, except some incidental expressions of marked rejection. He mourns for the flock of Christ, from whom wicked shepherds hide the pure water of doctrine, and give them to drink only water troubled and defouled by their feet, until there is dread that the sheep will die of thirst. He charges false Prophets with beguiling the people, taking away the worship of God, and substituting a worship of themselves. The worship of God consists, as he maintains, in loving, dreading, and trusting in God above all other things; but the Priests have broken the law of love and fear and trust. God should be prayed to absolve men from sin, as he forgave Peter and Mary Magdalene, without shrivings to Priests; and God is as mighty now as he was then. The Apostles taught not that sinners should confess to Priests, nor did they assert any power to cleanse men from the leprosy of guilt, which Christ alone can do: "for there nis but one Priest, that is, Christ, that may knowe in certaine the lepre of the soule." God ordained not that his Priests should set men penances for their sins, penances which cause them to trust in the shrift rather than in Christ's absolutions. He sorrows that people are thus led away from God, and argues, from scriptural examples, against the sale of those fictitious graces. In a strain of mingled lamentation and invective, he attacks the whole system of Monkery, and the exorbitant pride of the Clergy. The Priest forsakes a poor estate and labour, to become a lord of his brethren, and sing Latin prayers; but, "Ah! Lord!" he exclaims, "if they be thy servants, whose servants are we that cannot pray as they do? And, Lord, we laymen have a belief that thy goodness is endless; and if we keep thy commands, then are we thy true servants; and though we pray thee a little, and short, thou wilt think on us, and grant us what we need ; for so thou didst promise. And, Lord, I trow that pray a man never so many quaint prayers, if he keep not thy commands, he is not thy good servant. And, Lord, our hope is, that thou wilt as soon hear a ploughman's prayer, and he keep thy commands, as thou wilt do a man's of religion, though the ploughman may not have so much silver for his prayer as men of religion. For they know not so well how to price their prayers as these other chapmen; but, Lord, our hope is, that our prayers be never the worse, though not so well sold as other men's prayers." These allusions to the custom still prevalent of selling masses, indicate more than disapprobation of that single abuse : they express a state of popular feeling that will soon be developed more distinctly. In common with other Reformers, the Ploughman inveighs against singing in churches: "They singin merelich thy words, and that singing they clepen thy service." He judges that weeping for sin is more acceptable to God than turning his words into songs. Transubstantiation is condemned at considerable length. The pretence of Priests to make Christ's body is contrasted with their wicked practices, and the setting up of mawmets, or images, in great stone * Quoted and described at p. 494, supra.

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