Meanwhile a little leaven was at work, which served still to keep a better faith alive; a little salt of the earth which prevented the great carcase of human nature from offending the nostrils of its Creator. The Almighty has been ever wont to make such provision for the continuance of sound doctrine. Whilst all flesh was corrupting its way, still a household or two were left to keep his name from perishing, and to rally the true religion again--an Enos, an Enoch, or a Noah. When idolatry had once more spread itself over the world, almost to the extinction of the knowledge of the Most High, a few chosen vessels were left to the preservation of it still--an Abraham, a Lot, a Melchizedec, a Job. Generations rolled on, and God thought fit to act on a greater scale, but still on the same principle; and the Israelites were separated from mankind as a peculiar people, as the depositaries of the creed of man; and their fortunes were so shaped as to occasion their dispersion amongst the Gentiles, with the Bible in their hearts, and hands; and thus were they made the channels through which the will and works of God were communicated to those who would otherwise have sat in darkness; and to this origin, perhaps, rather than to be unassisted efforts of natural reason, is to be referred the more sublime part of the philosophy of the heathens.[149] So it was, in a degree, during the times of papal ignorance; for though to the question, which the Romanists taught every priest that could scarce read his breviary to ask, “Where was the religion of protestants before Luther?” it was sufficient to say, as it was said, “In the Bible;” still even in the darkest times, it had many faithful witnesses to produce besides, and both in individuals and in whole congregations might even then be read the eloquent chapters of the good man’s life. Thus, whilst the pope was grasping at universal power, and the monks were busy in seconding his efforts, and councils were giving authority to abuses both doctrinal and practical, on which his usurpation was grafting itself, and wars were waged between the several ecclesiastical orders, to the ruin of that which is the keystone of the gospel, _charity_, and ignorance was becoming more dense, and manners more profligate, there was abiding amongst the recesses of the Alps a race of hardy mountaineers, who held (as they still hold after ages of poverty and oppression) the essential articles of the reformed faith, and to whom it had been apparently derived from the apostles themselves:--Vaudois, Valenses, or Waldenses, was the name of this primitive people, dwelling as they did in the _valleys_ of the Cottian Alps--a name which, though at first like that of Albigenses and Romanists, having a reference to the local habitation of the persons who bore it, eventually embraced a large and widely scattered sect which professed certain religious opinions, and on more occasions than one sealed them with their blood. For that they took