we might say the miracles, that attended it, we can compare only to the march of the chosen people through the wilderness to the Land of Promise. [Illustration: CHURCH OF CHABAS, THE OLDEST IN THE VALLEYS.] CHAPTER XVIII. CONDITION OF THE WALDENSES FROM 1690. Annoyances--Burdens--Foreign Contributions--French Revolution-- Spiritual Revivals--Felix Neff--Dr. Gilly--General Beckwith-- Oppressed Condition previous to 1840--Edict of Carlo Alberto-- Freedom of Conscience--The Vaudois Church, the Door by which Religious Liberty Entered Italy--Their Lamp Kindled at Rome. With this second planting of the Vaudois in their Valleys, the period of their great persecutions may be said to have come to an end. Their security was not complete, nor their measure of liberty entire. They were still subject to petty oppressions; enemies were never wanting to whisper things to their prejudice; little parties of Jesuits would from time to time appear in their Valleys, the forerunners, as they commonly found them, of some new and hostile edict; they lived in continual apprehension of having the few privileges which had been conceded to them swept away; and on one occasion they were actually threatened with a second expatriation. They knew, moreover, that Rome, the real author of all their calamities and woes, still meditated their extermination, and that she had entered a formal protest against their rehabilitation, and given the duke distinctly to understand that to be the friend of the Vaudois was to be the enemy of the Pope.[145] Nevertheless their condition was tolerable compared with the frightful tempests which had darkened their sky in previous eras. The Waldenses had everything to begin anew. Their numbers were thinned; they were bowed down by poverty; but they had vast recuperative power; and their brethren in England and Germany hastened to aid them in reorganising their Church, and bringing once more into play that whole civil and ecclesiastical economy which the “exile” had so rudely broken in pieces. William III. of England incorporated a Vaudois regiment at his own expense, which he placed at the service of the duke, and to this regiment it was mainly owing that the duke was not utterly overwhelmed in his wars with his former ally, Louis XIV. At one point of the campaign, when hard pressed, Victor Amadeus had to sue for the protection of the Vaudois, on almost the very spot where the deputies of Gianavello had sued to him for peace, but had sued in vain.