Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

we have demonstrated, the names are no conclusive evidence of identity. They,
themselves, says Keller, repudiated: “during many centuries the name of
Waldenses.”
Says Dr. Allix, in Chapter XI of his Remarks on the Churches of Piedmont:
“Here, then, we have found a body of men in Italy before the year one
thousand and twenty-six who believed contrary to the opinions of the church
of Rome and who condemned their errors.” f660
Gilly says:
“It is certain that when Waldo fled from Lyons, he and his ‘poor men of
Lyons’ took refuge among the mountaineers of Provence and Lombardy,
whom he found to be, and not whom he caused to be, impugners of Romish
errors.” f661
Again, says Gilly:
“That this region was infected with what was heresy before Waldo went
thither appears first on the evidence of Peter Clugny, who, distinctly speaking
of that locality, wrote in the year 1127 and 1143 against heretics … secondly,
of a passage in Vol. 3 of ‘Historiae Patriae Monumenta,’ which states that the
whole of that mountain territory was infected with heresy in 1164.” f662
Armitage, an intemperate opposer of Baptist Church Perpetuity, while
generally ready to cast doubt on it, and admitting it only when no way to get
out of doing so, claiming the evidences of Waldenses existing before Waldo,
is: “too scanty and fragmentary to be used with confidence for historical
purposes” finds the proof so strong that he feels forced to concede: “There is
ground for the belief that an evangelical people lived in the isolated Cottion
Alps before the twelfth century.” He adds:
“Some Waldensian writers think they can trace their origin back to the days of
Constantine and even to the Apostles.” f663
In Limborch’s History of the Inquisition, Amsterdam, 1692, there is recorded,
from the year 1311, the following confession of a woman, a member of a
weaver family, which had for generations belonged to the Waldenses:
“The Waldenses belong to the number of those disciples which descended
from the Disciples and Apostles of Christ; from those Apostles upon whom
Christ transferred the power to bind and to loose; and these Waldenses retain
that potency even as Christ gave it to St. Peter and others. The chaplains and
monks know the meaning of the Holy Scriptures well enough, and also the
divine law, but they do not desire that the people should understand it, in
order to establish their own power over the people; for if they with clearness
and without concealment would teach the law of God as Christ revealed it
then they would not receive that which they require.”