So far we have sketched the leading points in the creed of the Waldensian Church. We now come to its organization. There seem to have been three epochs, so to speak, in reference to this feature of its history. For some eleven hundred years it remained as a portion of the universal and primitive church, rejecting the encroachments of the papal power, and the corruptions of Christian doctrine which that power imposed, not by authoritative enactments so much as by irregular influences, upon the greater part of the Western Church. During this time the church in the valleys of Piedmont retained that system of church government and worship which had been accepted by most, if not all, sections of the Christian Church in the third and fourth centuries. It was, therefore, during this period that the Waldensian Church enjoyed the privilege of that episcopacy which she never rejected as a matter of principle, but became deprived of by circumstances which gave her no choice. In proof of this I refer to that passage in the letter of Jerome to Riparius respecting Vigilantius, whose zealous and persevering opposition to the worship of saints, images, and relics, &c., had greatly provoked the irascible monk of Bethlehem. "I saw (says Jerome) a short time ago that monster Vigilantius. I would fain have bound this madman by passages of Holy Writ, as Hippocrates advises to confine maniacs with bonds; but he has departed, he has withdrawn, he has hurried away, he has escaped, and from the space between the Alps, _where Cottius reigned_,[B] and the waves of the Adriatic, his cries have reached me. Oh, infamous! he has found _even among the bishops_ accomplices of his wickedness." Here then we learn that in the country inhabited by the Waldenses there were bishops opposing the corruption and contending for the priests of the Christian faith. Nor was this confined even to Northern Italy; for we learn that two centuries later Gregory the Great, who was pope from A.D. 590 to 604, censures Seremius, bishop of Marseilles, for not only forbidding the adoration of images (which Gregory says he would have commended), but for actually destroying the images themselves. Towards the middle of the eighth century the prelates of the Gallican Church especially distinguished themselves by their determined opposition to such doctrines as the worship of images and relics, masses for the dead, purgatory, celibacy of the priests, supremacy of the popes, &c., errors inculcated, it would seem, by the English monk Boniface, who has been called the apostle of Germany.