OF

THE WALDENSES,

CONNECTED WITH

A SKETCH

OF THE

CHRISTIAN CHURCH

FROM

THE BIRTH OF CHRIST TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY WILLIAM JONES.

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones,
Forget not; in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their antient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rol'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow

A hundred fold, who having learn'd thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

SONNET by MILTON, on the Massacre of the Waldenses, 1655

London:

PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR,

By J. Haddon, Tabernacle Walk.

SOLD AT NO. 7, LOVELL'S COURT; BY W. BUTTON, AND T. HAMILTON,
PATERNOSTER-ROW; GUTHRIE AND TAIT, EDINBUBGH; J, AND

A. DUNCAN, GLASGOW.

MOTI

PREFACE.

THE History of the Christian Church, when prosecuted in minute detail, and in all its ramifications, is a copious theme, and has occupied the pens of many learned meu, both of our own and other countries. The elaborate treatises of Eusebius, Du Pin, Fleury, Mosheim, Priestley, Milner, and others of inferior consideration, have most of them been long before the public, and are all well known. To discuss the subject at large, or to enter into any competition with those works, as it is not to be expected in the compass of a single volume, so it must not be considered as having at all entered into the views of the present writer. The following pages, whatever may be their merits or defects, were never designed by their author to instruct persons of general reading; for he is fully aware that they contain little which is not familiar to that class of men; they were chiefly intended to communicate some interesting information to a few plain Christians whose views of the gospel of Christ, and of the nature of his kingdom in this world, happen to coincide pretty much with his own, but whose situations in life have debarred them from the opportunity of exploring the voluminous productions in which that information lay scattered.

Those who have bestowed any considerable degree of attention upon the article of Ecclesiastical History, will readily admit, that no period of it

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