Waldo and the Waldensians Before the Reformation (Paperback)

. 1880: ... THE WALDENSIANS BEFORE THE REFORMATION. BY EMILIO COMBA, PROFESSOR IN THE WALDENSIAN THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE, FLORENCE, ITALY. TRANSLATED BY T. E. COMBA. "La question de l'origine des Vaudois necessite un nouvel examen."--Muston. NEW YORK: FOR SALE BY ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS, AND DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY. 1880. Copyright, . Isso, T. E. CO MB A. PREFACE. In the first number of "The Catholic Presbyterian" we read the following lines signed by the late Professor Peter Lorimer, D.D., of the Presbyterian Seminary of London: --"It will be remembered by those who were present at the General Presbyterian Council in Edinburgh in 1877, that the condition of the history of the Waldensian Church was one of the subjects brought under the notice of the assembly. In the introductory paper read by me on The Desiderata of Presbyterian History, and the Importance of Siippfying Them, I referred to the historical literature of that church in the following terms: --"That eminently storied church has been fruitful in sympathetic historians, and down to our own times its long-settled historical traditions have never been seriously called in question save by its Roman adversaries. But in our own day these traditions have been thrown into the crucible of German criticism; and, if we should have to accept as valid and true the main results of this critical process, these would make no smill change in the long-established views of the antiquity of that church and of the doctrinal relations and affinities in vyhich it stands to the Reformation. We should have to conclude that the church of the Waldenses took its first rise from Peter Waldo towards the end of the twelfth century, instead of reaching back to the fourth or fifth; and that on a" good many more points of doctrine and practice than we have been wont to believe, it continued down to the Reformation to coincide with the Church of Rome. The chief representative of 3 f this somewhat trenchant criticism is Dr. Herzog, of Er...