Note 444 — Chapter VI · GERMANY. (continued 2)

There has recently been discovered at St. Florian, in Austria, an epistle written in 1368 by the Waldenses of Lombardy to some of their German brethren on the occasion of the withdrawal of certain members of the sect, who alleged in justification that the Waldenses were ignorant, that they had no divine authority, and that they were mercenary. Evidently the local church had appealed to the Lombards as to a central head, for an answer to these accusations, and the reply, together with a rejoinder by one of the apostates, throws valuable light upon the current beliefs of the sectaries. It appears that they carried their origin back to the primitive Church, claiming that their predecessors had opposed the reception of the Donation of Constantine, and that when Silvester refused to reject the perilous gift a voice sounded from heaven, “This day hath poison been spread in the Church of God.” As they were unyielding, they were driven out and persecuted, since when they had preserved the genuine tradition of the Church in obscurity and affliction. They asserted that Peter Waldo had been ordained to the priesthood, and that they possessed full authority, transmitted from God, but nothing is said as to the apostolical succession, and the apostate, Sigfried, reproaches them with only hearing confessions and sending their disciples to the Catholic churches for the other sacraments. There is no word as to transubstantiation, which must therefore have been an accepted doctrine among them, and their frequent quotations from Augustine and Bernard show that they admitted the authority of the doctors of the Church. They allude to two Franciscans who had recently joined the sect, to a priest who had done so and had been burned, and to a Bishop Bestardi, who, for the same offence, had been summoned to Rome, whence he had never returned.--Comba, Histoire des Vaudois d’Italie, I. 243-55.