I have already quoted Rorenco, one of the most zealous of the missionaries sent against the Vaudois; his family still remains in the valleys. One of his descendants bearing the title of Count of La Tour, in his Memorie Historiche, addressed to the Duke Victor Amadeus, allows that the Vaudois doctrine was not new, in the time of Claude, many persons having opposed the Roman See before him; he also asserts that their doctrine remained the same in the 11th and 12th centuries. Rorenco will not, however, allow that the doctrine was derived from the Apostles, but avows (which nearly amounts to the same thing) that there is no ascertaining when it was first received in the valleys. In fine, Samuel Casini, a Franciscan monk, says positively, in his work entitled Victoria Triomphale, printed at Coni, 1510, that "the errors of the Vaudois consisted in not admitting the Roman to be the sacred mother church, or obeying her traditions; although he could not, for his own part, deny that they acknowledged the Christian church, and had always been and still continued to be members of it." Now it seems to me hardly possible, after these proofs, that anyone should venture to deny the truly Apostolic succession of the Vaudois church; but as some people have supposed that the Vaudois, after receiving the opinions of the court of Rome, have subsequently been reformed, like all those who are called Protestants; let them say when and where the Vaudois reformation took place; and let them also account for the silence of all historians on such an event! But as long as the testimony above quoted, of Catholics, Protestants, Vaudois; nay, of the very edicts of their princes, and their own petitions and replies, exists, I shall consider it as proved that the Vaudois church, having received the Gospel in the earliest days of Christianity, is the parent of all the reformed churches, and has _never herself been reformed_. These truths having been established by such incontestable proofs, it remains only to give a sketch of the manners of the Vaudois, and the discipline of their churches, before we come to the historical part of my labours. CHAPTER V. MANNERS OF THE VAUDOIS