“And such a body were the Waldenses, inhabiting the eastern valleys of the Cottian Alps. They are known, from the testimony of cotemporary Catholics and their own authors, to have existed there as early as the eleventh century. It was then, and is now, claimed by themselves, and admitted by their enemies, that they had subsisted there from a much earlier age. These were a Christian church, having the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, regarding them as a revelation from God, and making them the rule of their faith; having a ministry of their own, holding religious assemblies, professing and teaching the doctrines of the gospel, and celebrating the sacraments. “They were distinguished for the simplicity and purity of their lives. It was asserted by them, and repeated by the Catholics, that they were induced to retreat to the secluded valleys which they inhabit, to escape the despotism of the rulers and the corruptions and tyranny of the church, soon after its nationalization by Constantine. They have continued to subsist there to the present time, as a separate and evangelical church.”—_Exp. Apoc._, pp. 348, 349, 359. Says Mr. Elliott:—“I must not pass on without pressing on the reader’s notice this notable pre-figuration of the seclusion of Christ’s church in the wilderness, as the true and fittest answer to the Romish anti-Protestant taunt, ‘Where was your religion before Luther?’ Protestants have not duly, as it seems to me, applied the answer here given. For the wilderness-life necessarily, as I must repeat,—and that on Bossuet’s own showing,—implies the _invisibility_ of her who lives in it. And consequently, instead of the long previous invisibility of a church like the Lutheran, or Anglican Reformed, of the sixteenth century, in respect of doctrine and worship, being an argument against, it is an argument for it. The Romish church, which never knew the predicted wilderness-life, could not, for this very reason, be the woman of the 12th Apocalyptic chapter; that is, could not be the true church of Christ. “For 1260 prophetic days, then, or years, she was to disappear from men’s view in the Roman world. Is it asked how her vitality was preserved? Doubtless in her children, known to God, though for the most part unknown to men; just like the 7000 that Elijah knew not of, who had not bowed the knee to Baal; some, it might be, in monasteries, some in the secular walks of life; but all alike insulated in spirit from those around them, and as regards the usual means of grace, spiritually destitute and desolate; even as in a barren and dry land, where no water is.—Besides whom, some few there were of her children,—some very few,—prepared, like Elijah of old, to act a bolder part, and stand forth, under special commission from God, as Christ’s witnesses before Christendom.”—_Horæ Apoc._, pp. 55-57.