them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable momentum. At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council of 1179. When that Council forbade them to preach without permission from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader, preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey God rather than man. Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a “vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against heresy and perhaps no Inquisition. The movement which called out such resistance from those who repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than this, naively remarks à propos of their genial custom of starving themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—