Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

symbolica, apostolic creed; only that they abhor the church of Rome and her
priesthood, to accept which the mass of the laity are readily inclined.” f622
Again, St. Bernard, born 1091, one of the ablest Romish advocates, said:
“There is a sect which calls itself after no man’s name, which pretends to be
in direct line of apostolic succession; and which, rustic and unlearned though
it is, contends that the church is wrong, and that itself alone is right. It must
derive its origin from the devil, since there is no other extraction which we
can assign to it.” f623
Of A.D. 1025, says Robinson:
“Atto, bishop of Vercelli, had complained of such people eighty years before
and so had others before him, and there is the highest reason to believe that
they had always been in Italy.” f624
Bernard de Fontcaud, of the twelfth century, in his work, Contra Valdenses et
Arianos, says but little of the Waldenses, but in his preface says: “Valdenses
dicti sunt nimirum a valle densa” — the Waldenses are called from the dense
valley. f625 This is sufficient to show that they were not originally named from
Waldo, and strongly implies they antedated him. Nowhere in his book does he
mention Valdo. Living in Waldo’s age and writing against the Waldenses, to
have made no mention of their origin or of Waldo is utterly irreconcilable with
the notion that they originated with Waldo.
In A.D. 1096 Pope Urban issued a bull in which he mentions the French side
of the same valleys as infested with heresy. f626
A. D. 1119 the Council of Toulouse decrees the Inquisition against heretics
dwelling in Italy and partly in France. f627
A. D. 1192: “Statuta synodalia Odinis Episcopoi Tullensis, de haeriticis … qui
vocantur Vadoys” — synodical laws against those called Vaudois. The
immense numbers of the Waldenses, calling forth so many curses of
Romanism, demonstrate Waldo not their founder, as this is too early for them
to have attained such strength and influence. Claude Seyssel, Archbishop of
Turin, who visited the Waldenses of the Piedmontese valleys in 1517, who was
in the valleys before the Reformation,
“informs us (vol. v.) that the heretics of the valleys had all along been
ascribing an antiquity to their sect similar to that which, according to Reiner,
was claimed by the Leonists.” f628
I have now shown that Romish expressions, from the sixteenth to the tenth
century are overwhelming testimony to the Waldenses existing long before
Waldo. Thus, one of the main pillars of Dieckhoff’s and Herzog’s building is
gone. I think I could here safely leave their antiquity as made out. But, as