The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea, however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe. Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which she taught. After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain, and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously, and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears