Other people had urged a return to primitive Christianity earlier than the Quakers. The Albigenses, in the south of France during the thirteenth century, and the Waldenses, who lived in the valleys of Piedmont, in Northern Italy, both held somewhat similar ideas, but in each case the iron hand of persecution had suppressed them. The Quakers would doubtless have met with a similar fate had they come into existence a century earlier, for they held even more extreme views than had the Albigenses. But by the reign of Charles II. the principles of the Reformation had made such headway that it was impossible to do away with a new form of religion by killing its converts. The government was willing to go a certain distance in suppressing these new heretics, and ordinances were passed empowering justices to imprison any who denied the validity of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Quakers who held meetings in the streets or market-places were liable to be arrested for committing a breach of the peace, and their missionaries were often treated as vagrants and whipped; but these were extremely light punishments compared with those that had been inflicted earlier. Although there were a few men and women among the early Quakers who made themselves conspicuous by their extreme views, as there are among the people of any sect, the Quakers were for the greater part a remarkably sober, sensible, and law-abiding party. The Catholics, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, and others had never hesitated to hold their meetings in secret when the laws seemed too severe against them. The Quakers, however, never held secret meetings; they performed their duties openly, no matter how much the magistrates were opposed to them. They argued their cause freely and openly on all occasions, and they wrote a great many pamphlets setting forth their belief and also telling to what persecutions they had been subjected. These tracts were widely distributed, and served to call attention to the reasonableness of their cause and to win sympathy for their struggles with the law. They also soon showed the English virtue of obstinacy in their cause; for no matter how many times they were imprisoned or arrested they continued steadfastly on their course. At first people laughed at the Quakers' custom of holding their religious meetings in prison just as they might have held them in their meetinghouses, but before long the laughter changed to respect, and finally became sincere admiration. The Puritans, who had themselves had to endure the same sort of treatment a little while before, could appreciate the attitude of this still younger religious movement, and though they did not sympathize with the views of the Quakers they came to admire their courageous independence.