RISK AND PROGRESS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM IN PIEDMONT.
First Entrance into Italy--Never can be Repeated--The Cathedral of
Turin--The Royal Palace--The Museum--Egyptian
Mummies--Reflections--Landmark of the Vaudois Valleys--Piedmontese
House of Commons--Piedmontese Constitution--Perils that surrounded
it--Providentially shielded from these--Numbers and Wealth of the
Priesthood--Want of Public Opinion--Rise of a Free Press--Its
Power--The _Gazetta del Popolo_--The Bible quoted by the
Journalists--The flourishing State of the Country--The Waldensian
Temple and Congregation--Workmen's Clubs--The Capuchin Monastery--A
Capuchin Friar--Sunset.
One can enter Italy for the first time only once. For, however often we
may climb the Alps, and tread the land that lies stretched out at their
base, it is with a cold pulse, compared with the fever of excitement
into which we are thrown by the first touch of that soil. The charm is
flown; the tree of knowledge has been plucked; and never more can we
taste the dreamy yet intense delight which attended the first unfolding
of the gates of the Alps, and the first rising of the fair vision of
Italy.
In truth, the Italy which one comes to see on his second visit is not
the Italy that first drew him across the Alps. That was the Italy of
history, or rather of his own imagination. The fair form his fancy was
wont to conjure up, draped in the glowing recollections of empire and of
arms, and encompassed with the halo of heroic deeds, he can see no more.
There meets him, on the other side of the Alps, a vision very unlike
this. The Italy of the Caesars is gone; and where she sat is now a poor,
naked, cowering thing, with a chain upon her arm,--the Italy of the
Popes. But the fascination attends the traveller some short way into
that land. Indeed, he is loath to lose it, and would rather see Italy
through the warm colourings of history, and the bright hues of his own
fancy, than look upon her as she is.
I shall never forget the intense excitement that thrilled me when I
found myself rolling along on the magnificent avenue of pollard-elms,
that runs all the way from Rivoli to Turin. The voluptuous air, which
seemed to fill the landscape with a dreamy gaiety; the intense sunlight,
which tinted every object with extraordinary brilliancy, from the bright
leaves overhead, to the burning domes of Turin in front; the dark eyes
of the natives, which flashed with a fervour like that of their own sun;
the Alps towering above me, and running off in a vast unbroken line of
glittering masses,--all contributed to form a picture of so novel and
brilliant a kind, that it absolutely produced an intoxication of
delight.
I passed a few days at Turin; and the pleasure of my stay was much
enhanced by the society of my friend the Rev. John Bonar, whom I had met
at Chamberry, _en route_, with his family, for Malta. We visited
together the chief objects of interest in the capital of Piedmont. The
churches we saw of course. And though we had been carried blindfolded
across the Alps, and set down in the cathedral of Turin, the statuary
alone would have told us that we were in Italy. The most unpractised eye
could see at once the difference betwixt these statues and those of the
Transalpine churches. The Italian sculptors seemed to possess some
secret by which they could make the marble live. Some half-dozen of
priests, with red copes (I presume it was a martyr's day, for on such
days the Church's dress is red), ranged in a pew near the altar, were
singing psalms. Whether the good men were thinking of their dinner, I
knew not; but they yawned portentously, wrung their hands with an air of
helplessness, and looked at us as if they half expected that we would
volunteer to do duty for an hour or so in their stead. A bishop chanting
his psalter under the groined roof of cathedral, and a covenanter
praying in his hill-side cave, would form an admirable picture of two
very different styles of devotion. There were some dozen of old women on
the floor, whom the mixed motive of saying their prayers and picking up
a chance alms seemed to have drawn thither. From the Duomo we went to
the King's palace. We walked through a suit of splendid apartments,
though not quite accordant in their style of ornament and comfort with
our English ideas. The floor and roof were of rich and beautiful
mosaics; the walls were adorned with the more memorable battles of the
Sardinian nation; and the furniture was minutely and elaborately inlaid
with mother-of-pearl. Three rooms more particularly attracted my
attention. The first contained the throne of the kings of Savoy,--a
gilded chair, under a crimson canopy, and surrounded by a gilt railing.
I thought, as I gazed upon it, how often the power of that throne had
lain heavily upon the poor Waldenses. The other room contained the bed
on which King Charles Albert died. It is yet in my readers'
recollection, that Charles Albert died at Oporto; but the whole
furniture of the room in which he breathed his last was transported,
together with his ashes, to Turin. It was an affecting sight. There it
stood, huddled into a corner,--a poor bed of boards, with a plain
coverlet, such as a Spanish peasant might sleep beneath; a chest of deal
drawers; and a few of the necessary utensils of a sick chamber. The
third room contained the Queen's bed of state. Its windows opened
sweetly upon the fine gardens of the palace, where the first ray, as it
slants downwards from the crest of the Alps into the valley of the Po,
falls on the massy foliage of the mulberry and the orange. On the table
were some six or eight books, among which was a copy of the Psalms of
David. "It is very fine," said my friend Mr Bonar, glancing up at the
gilded canopy and silken hangings of the bed, and poking his hand at the
same time into its soft woolly furnishings, "but nothing but blankets
can make it comfortable."
From the palace we passed to the Museum. There you see pictures,
statues, coins stamped with the effigies of kings that lived thousands
of years ago, and papyrus parchments inscribed with the hieroglyphics of
old Egypt, and other curiosities, which it has required ages to collect,
as it would volumes to describe. Not the least interesting sight there
is the gods of Egypt,--cats, ibises, fish, monkeys, heads of calves and
bulls, all lying in their original swathings. I looked narrowly at these
divinities, but could detect no difference betwixt the god-cat of Egypt
and the cats of our day. Were it possible to re-animate one of them, and
make it free of our streets, I fear the god would be mistaken for an
ordinary quadruped of its own kind, pelted and worried by mischievous
boys and dogs, as other cats are. I do not know that a modern priest of
Turin has any very good ground for taunting an old Egyptian priest with
his cat-worship. If it is impossible to tell the difference betwixt a
cat which is simply a cat, and a cat which is a god, it is just as
impossible to tell the difference betwixt a bread-wafer which is simply
bread, and a bread-wafer which is the flesh and blood, the soul and
divinity, of Christ.
Seeing in Egypt the gods died, it will not surprise the reader that in
Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters
of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same
stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone
sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had
placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes
and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth,
through which the features could be seen not indistinctly. Now, thought
I, I shall hear all about old Egypt. Perhaps this man has seen Joseph,
or talked with Jacob, or witnessed the wonders of the exodus. Come, tell
me your name or profession, or some of the strange events of your
history. Did you don the mail-coat of the warrior, or the white robe of
the priest? Did you till the ground, and live on garlic; or were you
owner of a princely estate, and wont to sit on your house-top of
evenings, enjoying the delicious twilight, and the soft flow of the
Nile? Come now, tell me all. The door of a departed world seemed about
to open. I felt as if standing on its threshold, and looking in upon the
shadowy forms that peopled it. But ah! these lips spoke not. With the
Rosetta stone as the key, I could compel the granite slabs and the brown
worn parchments around me to give up their secrets. But where was the
key that could open that breast, and read the secrets locked up in it?
And this form had still a living owner! This awoke a train of thought
yet more solemn. Who, what, and where is he? Anxious as I had been to
have the door of that mysterious past in which he had lived opened to
me, I was yet more anxious to look into that more mysterious and awful
future into which he had gone. What had he seen and felt these four
thousand years? Did the ages seem long to him, or was it but as a few
days since he left the earth? I went close up to the dark curtain, but
there was no opening,--no chink by which I could see into the world
beyond. Will no kind hand draw the veil aside but for a moment? There it
has hung unlifted age after age, concealing, with its impenetrable
folds, all that mortals would most like to know. Myriads and myriads
have passed within, but not one has ever given back voice, or look, or
sign, to those they left behind, and from whom never before did they
conceal thought or wish. Why is this? Do they not still think of us? Do
they not still love us? Would they softly speak to us if they could?
What gulf divides them? Ah! how silent are the dead!
Close by the great highway into Italy lie the "Valleys of the Vaudois."
One might pass them without being aware of their near presence, or that
he was treading upon holy ground;--so near to the world are they, and
yet so completely hidden from it. Ascend the little hill on the south of
Turin, and follow with your eye the great wall of the Alps which bounds
the plain on the north. There, in the west, about thirty miles from
where you stand, is a tall pyramidal-shaped mountain, towering high
above the other summits. That is Monte Viso, which rises like a
heaven-erected beacon, to signify from afar to the traveller the land of
the Waldenses, and to call him, with its solemn voice, to turn aside and
see the spot where "the bush burned and was not consumed." We shall make
a short, a very short visit to these valleys, than which Europe has no
more sacred soil. But first let us speak of some of the bulwarks which
an all-wise Providence has erected in our day around a Church and people
whose existence is one of the great living miracles of the world.
The revolutions which swept over Italy in 1848 were the knell of the
other Italian States, but to Piedmont they were the trumpet of liberty.
No man living can satisfactorily explain why the same event should have
operated so disasterously for the one, and so beneficially for the
other. No reason can be found in the condition of the country itself:
the thing is inexplicable on ordinary principles; and the more
intelligent Piedmontese at this day speak of it as a miracle. But so is
the fact. Piedmont is a constitutional kingdom; and I went with M.
Malan, himself a Waldensian, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, to
see the hall where their Parliament sits. A spacious flight of steps
conducts to a noble hall, in form an ellipse, and surmounted by a dome.
At one end of the ellipse hangs a portrait of the President, and
underneath is his richly gilt chair, with a crimson-covered table before
it. Right in front of the Speaker's chair, on a lower level, is placed
the tribune, which much resembles the precentor's desk in a Scottish
church. The tribune is occupied only when a Minister makes a Ministerial
declaration, or a Convener of a Committee gives in his Report. An open
space divides the tribune from the seats of the members. These last run
all round the hall, in concentric rows of benches, also covered with
crimson. "There, on the right," said M. Malan, "sit the priest party. In
the front are the Ministerial members; on the left is my seat. There is
an extreme left to which I do not belong: I have not passed the
constitutional line. This lower tier of galleries is for the conductors
of the press and the diplomatic corps; this higher gallery is for ladies
and military men. We are 204 members in all. We have a member for every
twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Our population is four millions and a
half. Our House of Peers contains only ninety members. The King has the
privilege of nominating to it, but peers so created are only for life."
It was, in truth, a marvellous sight;--a free and independent Parliament
meeting in the ancient capital of the bigoted Piedmont, with a free
press and a public looking on, and one of the long proscribed Vaudois
race occupying a seat in it. The more I thought of it, the more I
wondered. The causes which had led to so extraordinary a result seemed
clearly providential. When King Charles Albert in 1848 gave his subjects
a Constitution, no one had asked it, and few there were who could value
it, or even knew what a Constitution meant. One or two public writers
there were who said that public opinion demanded it; but, in sooth,
there was then no public opinion in the country. Soon after this the
campaign in Lombardy was commenced, and the result of that campaign
threatened the Piedmontese Constitution with extinction. The Piedmontese
army was beaten by the Austrians, and had to make a hasty and inglorious
retreat into their own country. Every one then expected that Radetzky
would march upon Turin, put down the Constitution, and seize upon
Sardinia. Contrary to his usual habits, the old warrior halted on the
frontier, as if kept back by an invisible power, and the Constitution
was saved. Then came the death of Charles Albert, of a broken heart, in
Oporto, whither he had fled; and every one believed that the Piedmontese
charter would accompany its author to the tomb. The dispositions and
policy of the new king were unknown; but the probability was that he
would follow the example of his brother sovereigns of Italy, all of whom
had begun to revoke the Constitutions which they had so recently
inaugurated with solemn oaths. Happily these fears were not realized.
The new perils passed over, and left the Constitution unscathed. King
Victor Immanuel,--a constitutional monarch simply by accident,--turned
out a good-natured, easy-minded man, who loved the chase and his country
seat, and found it more agreeable to live on good terms with his
subjects, and enjoy a handsome civil list,--which his Parliament has
taken care to vote him,--than to be indebted for his safety and a
bankrupt exchequer to the bayonets of his guards. Thus marvellously,
hitherto, in the midst of dangers at home and re-action abroad, has the
Piedmontese charter been preserved. I dwell with the greater minuteness
on this point, because on the integrity of that charter are suspended
the civil liberties of the Church of the Vaudois. When I was in Turin
the Constitution was three years old; but even then its existence was
exceedingly precarious. The King could have revoked it at any moment;
and there was not then, I was assured by General Beckwith,--who knows
the state of the Piedmontese nation well,--moral power in the country to
offer any effectual resistance, had the royal will decreed the
suppression of constitutional government. "But," added he, "should the
Constitution live three years longer, the people by that time will have
become so habituated to the working of a free Constitution, and public
opinion will have acquired such strength, that it will be impossible for
the monarch to retrace his steps, even should he be so inclined." It is
exactly three years since that time, and the state of the Piedmontese
nation at this moment is such as to justify the words of the sagacious
old man.
The first grand difficulty in the way of the Constitution was, the
numbers and power of the priesthood. In no country in Europe,--not even
in France and Austria, when their size is compared,--were the benefices
so numerous, or their holders so luxuriously fed. Piedmont was the
paradise of priests. The ecclesiastical statistics of that kingdom,
furnished to the French journal _La Presse_, on occasion of the
introduction of the bill for suppressing the convents, on the 8th of
January 1855, reveals a state of things truly astonishing.
Notwithstanding that the population is only four and a half millions,
there are in Sardinia 7 archbishops; 34 bishops; 41 chapters, with 860
canons attached to the bishoprics; 73 simple chapters, with 470 canons;
1100 livings for the canons; and, lastly, 4267 parishes, with some
thousands of parish priests. The domain of the Church represents a
capital of 400 millions of francs, with a yearly revenue of 17 millions
and upwards. This enormous wealth is divided amongst the clergy in
proportions grossly unequal. The 41 prelates of Sardinia enjoy a revenue
of nearly a million and a half of francs, which is double what used to
maintain all the bishops of the French empire. The Archbishop of Turin
has an income of 120,000 francs, which is more than the whole bench of
Belgian bishops. The other prelates are paid in proportion. As a set-off
to this wealth, there are in Sardinia upwards of 2000 curates, not one
of whom has so much as 800 francs, or about L.35 sterling. These are
thus tempted to prey upon the people. Such is the terrible organization
which the King and Parliament have to encounter in carrying out their
reforms, and such is the fearful incubus which has pressed for ages upon
the social rights and industrial energies of the Piedmontese people.
But this is but a part of the great sacerdotal army encamped in
Piedmont. There are 71 religious orders besides, divided into 604
houses, containing in all 8563 monks and nuns. The expense of feeding
these six hundred houses, with their army of eight thousand strong,
forms an item of two millions and a-half of francs, and represents a
capital of forty-five millions. The greatest admirer of these
fraternities will scarce deny that this is a handsome remuneration for
their services; indeed, we never could make out what these services
really are. They do not teach the youth, or pray with the aged. For
reading they have no taste; and to write what will be read, or preach
what will be listened to, is far beyond their ability. Their pious hands
disdain all contact with the plough, and the loom, and the spade. They
share with their countrymen neither the labours of peace, nor the
dangers of war. They lounge all day in the streets, or about the wine
shops; and, when the dinner-hour arrives, they troop home-wards, to
retail the gossip of the town over a groaning board and a well-filled
flagon. Thus they fatten like pigs, being about as cleanly, but scarce
as useful. It is not surprising that a bill should at last have reached
the Chambers, proposing, _first_, the better distribution of the
revenues of the Church, equal to a fourth of the kingdom; and, _second_,
the suppression of those "houses," the rules of which bind over their
members to sheer, downright idleness, leaving only those who have some
show of public duty to perform. The priests denounce the bill as
"spoliation and robbery" of course, and prophesy all manner of things
against so wicked a kingdom. Doubtless it is daring impiety in the eyes
of Rome to forbid a man with a shaven crown and a brown cloak to play
the idler and vagabond. We are only surprised that the people of
Piedmont have so long suffered their labours to be eaten up by an order
of men useless, and worse than useless.
Another grand difficulty in Piedmont was the absence of a middle
class,--wealthy, intelligent, and independent. No one felt that he had
rights, and you never heard people saying there, as you may do in
Britain, "this is my right, and I will have it." A feeling of individual
right, and of responsibility,--for the two go together,--was then
just beginning to dawn upon the popular mind. This was accompanied
by a certain amount of disorganizing influence; not that of
Socialism,--which, happily, scarce existed in Piedmont,--but that of
self-action. Every one was feeling his own way. The priests, of course,
were exceedingly wroth, and loudly accused Protestantism as the cause of
all this commotion in men's minds. Alas! there was no Protestantism in
Piedmont, for it had been one of the most bigoted kingdoms in Italy. It
was their own handiwork; for a tyranny always produces a democracy. As
if by a miracle, a powerful and popular press started up in Turin. The
writers in the _Opinione_ and the _Gazetta del Popolo_, acting, I
suspect, on a hint given by some Vaudois that there was an old book, now
little known, that would help them in the war they were now waging, went
to the Bible, and, finding that it made against the priests, were
liberal in their quotations from it. Their most telling hits were the
extracts from Scripture; and finding it so, they quoted yet more
largely. The priests were much concerned to see Holy Scripture so far
profaned as to be quoted in newspapers, and exposed freely to the gaze
of the vulgar. But what could they do? Their own literary qualifications
did not warrant them to enter the lists with these writers: they had
forgot the way to preach, unless at Lent; they could work the
confessional, but even it began to be silenced by the powerful artillery
of the press. At an earlier stage they might have roused the peasantry,
and marched upon the Constitution, whose life they knew was the death of
their power; but it was too late in 1851. An attempt of this sort made a
year or two after, among the peasantry of the Val d'Aosta, turned out a
miserable failure. Thus, a movement which in other countries came
forward under the sanction of the priesthood, from the very outset in
Piedmont took a contrary direction, and set in full against the Church.
Since that day liberty has been working itself, bit by bit, into the
action of the Constitution, and the feelings of the people; and now, I
believe, neither King nor Parliament, were they so inclined, could put
it down.
The sum of the matter then is, that of all the kingdoms which the era of
1848 started in the path of free government, the brave little State of
Piedmont alone has persevered to this day. Amid the wide weltering sea
of Italian anarchy and despotism, here, and here alone, liberty finds a
spot on which to plant her foot. Again we ask, why is this? There is
nothing in the past history of the country,--nothing in the present
state of the nation,--which can account for it. We must look elsewhere
for a solution; and we do not hesitate to avow our firm conviction, that
a special Providence has shielded the Constitution of Piedmont, because
with that Constitution is bound up the liberties of the ancient martyr
Church of the Vaudois. It was the only one of the Italian Constitutions
that carried in it so sacred a guarantee of permanency. On the 17th of
February 1848 (the day is worth remembering), Charles Albert, by a royal
edict, admitted the Waldenses to the enjoyment of all civil and
political rights, in common with the rest of their fellow-subjects. Now,
for the first time in a thousand years, the trumpet of liberty sounded
amid the Vaudois valleys; and the shout of joy which the Alps sent back
seemed like the first response to the prayer which had so often ascended
from these hills, "How long, O Lord." Would not Sodom have been spared
had ten righteous men been found in it? and why not Piedmont, seeing the
Waldensian Church was there? Yes, Piedmont is the little Zoar of the
Italian plains! Little may its people reck to whom it is they owe their
escape. It is nevertheless a truth that, but for the poor Vaudois, whom,
instigated by the Pope, they long and ruthlessly laboured to
exterminate, their country would have been at this day in the same
gulph of social demoralization and political re-action with Tuscany, and
Naples, and Rome. These last were taken, and Piedmont escaped.
And the country is truly flourishing. It has thriven every day since
Charles Albert emancipated the Vaudois. No one can cross its frontier
without being struck with the contrast it presents to the other Italian
States. While they are decaying like a corpse, it is flourishing like
the chestnut-tree of its own mountains. The very faces of the people may
tell you that the country is free and prosperous. Its citizens walk
about with the cheerful, active air of men who have something to do and
to enjoy, and not with the listless, desponding, heart-sick look which
marks the inhabitants of the other States of Italy. Here, too, you miss
that universal beggary and vagabondism that disfigure and pollute all
the other countries of the Peninsula. What rich loam the ploughman turns
up! What magnificent vines shade its plains! Public works are in
progress, railways have been formed, and new houses are building. Not
fewer than a hundred houses were built in Turin last year, which is
more, I verily believe, than in all the other Italian towns out of
Piedmont taken together. Thus, while the other States of Italy are
foundering in the tempest, Piedmont lives because it carries the Vaudois
and their fortunes.
From the hall of the Chamber of Deputies I went with M. Malan to the
office of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, to be introduced to its editors. The
_Gazetta del Popolo_ is a daily paper, with a circulation of 15,000;
and, being sold at a penny, is universally read by the middle and lower
classes. It is the _Times_ of Piedmont. Its editors are men of great
talent, and write with the practical good sense and racy style of
Cobbett. They are not religious men, neither are they Romanists, though
nominally connected with the Church of the State; but they are warm
advocates of constitutional government, hearty haters of the Papacy, and
have done much to enlighten the public mind, and loosen it from
Romanism. They first of all made inquiries respecting the external
resemblance of Puseyistic and Popish worship, as I had seen the latter
in Italy. They made yet more eager inquiries respecting the progress and
prospects of Puseyism in England, and about a then recent declaration of
the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the effect that there were only two
Bishops in the Church of England that had gone over to Puseyism. They
seemed to feel that the fortunes of the Papacy would turn mainly upon
the fortunes of Puseyism in England. As regarded the Archbishop, I
replied, that I believed in the substantial accuracy of his statement,
that there were not more than two members of the episcopate who could be
held to be decided Puseyites; and as regarded the progress of Puseyism,
I said, that it had been making great and rapid progress, but that the
papal aggression, in my humble opinion, had dealt a somewhat heavy blow
to both Popery and Puseyism,--that so long as Romanism came begging for
toleration, it had found great favour in the eyes of the liberals; but
when it came claiming to govern, it had scared away many of its former
supporters, who had come to know it better,--and that the Protestant
feeling which the aggression had evoked on the part of the Court, the
Parliament, and the people, had tended to discourage Romanism, and all
kindred or identical creeds. They were delighted to hear this, and said
that they would baptize the fact in the _Gazetta del Popolo_, "the
assassination of the Papacy by Cardinal Wiseman." Their paper, M. Malan
afterwards told me, is published on Sabbaths as well (there are worse
things done on that day in Italy, even by bishops), on which day they
print their weekly sermon. "You won't preach," say they to the priests;
"therefore we will;" and it is in their Sabbath sheet that they make
their bitterest assaults upon the priesthood. They quote largely from
Scripture: not that they wish to establish evangelical truth, of which
they know little, but because they find such quotations to be the most
powerful weapons which they can employ against the Papacy. In truth,
they advertised in this way the Bible to their countrymen, many of whom
had never heard of such a book till then.
I was inexpressibly delighted to find such men in Turin wielding such
influence, and took the liberty of saying at parting, that we in England
had beheld with admiration the noble stand Piedmont had made in behalf
of constitutional government,--that we were watching with intense
interest the future career of their nation,--that we were cherishing the
hope that they would manfully maintain the ground they had taken
up,--and that in England, and especially in Scotland, we felt that the
root of all the despotism of the Continent was the Papacy,--that the way
to strike for liberty was to strike at Rome,--and that till the Papacy
was overthrown, never would the nations of the world be either free or
happy. They assured me that in these sentiments they heartily concurred,
and that they were the very ideas they were endeavouring to propagate.
They gave me, on taking leave, a copy of that morning's paper as a
_souvenir_; and on examining it afterwards, I found that the topic of
its leading article was quite in the vein of our conversation. The great
bulk of the liberal party in Piedmont shared even then the ideas of the
editors of the _Gazetta del Popolo_, and felt that to lay the
foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of
Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,--it is the primal truth in the
science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be
understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action
of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections have been
against kings and aristocrats: even in 1848 the Italians were willing to
accept the leadership of the Pope. The perfidies and atrocities of which
they have since been the victims have burned the essential tyranny of
the papal system into their minds; and the next insurrection that takes
place will be against the Papacy.
A constitution, a free press, and a public opinion, are but the outward
defences of a divine and immortal principle, which, rooted in the soil
of Piedmont, has outlived a long winter, and is now beginning to bud
afresh, and to send forth goodlier shoots than ever. To this I next
turned. Conducted by M. Malan, I went to the western quarter of Turin,
where, amid the gardens and elegant mansions of the suburbs, workmen
were digging the foundations of what was to be a spacious building. On
this spot the Dominicans in former ages had burned the bodies of the
martyrs; and now the Waldensian temple stands here,--a striking proof,
surely, of the immortality of truth,--to rise, and live, and speak
boldly, on the very spot where she had been bound to a stake, burned,
and extinguished, as the persecutor believed. This church, not the least
elegant in a city abounding with elegant structures, has since been
opened, and is filled every Sabbath with well-nigh a thousand
auditors,--the largest congregation, I will venture to say, in Turin.
In 1851 I could visit the cradle of this movement. It had its first rise
in the labours of Felix Neff, twenty-five years before; but it was not
till the revolution of 1848 that it appeared above ground. Even in 1851,
colportage among the Piedmontese was prohibited, though it was allowable
to print or import the Bible for the use of the Waldenses, and the
Government winked at its sale to their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. I
was shown in M. Malan's banking office the Bible depot, and was
gratified to find that the sales which were made to applicants only had
during the past year amounted to a thousand copies. Evening meetings
were held every day of the week, in various parts of Turin, at which the
Bible was read, and points of controversy betwixt Christianity and
Romanism eagerly discussed. The Rev. M. Meille, the able editor of the
_Buona Novella_,--a paper then just starting,--informed me that not
fewer than ninety persons had been present at the meeting superintended
by him the night before. These week-day assemblages, as well as the
Sabbath audiences, were of a very miscellaneous character,--Vaudois, who
had come to Turin to be servants, for, prior to the revolution, they
could be nothing else; Piedmontese tradesmen; Swiss, Germans, and
Italian refugees, to whom three pastors ministered,--one in French, one
in German, and a third in the Italian tongue. There were then not fewer
than ten re-unions every week in Turin. The idea, too, had been started
of taking advantage of the workmen's clubs for the propagation of the
gospel. A network of such societies covered northern and central Italy.
The clubs in Turin corresponded with those in Genoa, Alessandria, and
all the principal towns of Piedmont; and these again with similar clubs
in central Italy; and any new theory or doctrine introduced into one
soon made the round of all. The plan adopted was to send evangelical
workmen into these clubs, who were listened to as they propounded the
new plan of justification by faith. The clubs in Turin were first
leavened with the gospel; thence it was extended to Genoa, and gradually
also to central Italy. While the _proletaires_ in France were discussing
the claims of labour, the workmen in Piedmont were canvassing the
doctrines of the New Testament; and hence the difference betwixt the
two countries.
It was now drawing towards sunset, and I purposed enjoying the
twilight,--delicious in all climates, but especially in Italy,--on the
terrace of the College or Monastery of the Capuchins. This monastery
stands on the Collina, a romantic height on the south of Turin, washed
by the Po, with villas and temples on its crest and summits. I took my
way through the noble street that leads southwards, halting at the
book-stalls, and picking out of their heaps of rubbish an Italian copy
of the Catechism of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Collina was all in a
blaze; the windows of the Palazzo Regina glittered in the setting beams;
and the dome of the Superga shone like gold. Crossing the Po, I ascended
by the winding avenue of shady acacias, which are planted there to
protect the cowled heads of the fathers from the noonday sun. One of the
monks was winding his way up hill, at a pace which gave me full
opportunity of observing him. A little black cap covered his scalp; his
round bullet-head, which bristled with short, thick-set hairs, joined
on, by a neck of considerably more than the average girth, to shoulders
of Atlantean dimensions. His body was enveloped in a coarse brown
mantle, which descended to his calves, and was gathered round his middle
with a slender white cord. His naked feet were thrust into sandals. The
features of the "religious" were coarse and swollen; and he strode up
hill before me with a gait which would have made a peaceful man, had he
met him on a roadside in Scotland, give him a wide offing. Parties of
soldiers wounded in the late campaign were sauntering in the square of
the monastery, or looking over the low wall at the city beneath. Their
pale and sickly looks formed a striking contrast to the athletic forms
of the full-fed monks. It was inexplicable to me, that the youth of
Sardinia, immature and raw, should be drafted into the army, while such
an amount of thews and sinews as this monastery, and hundreds more,
contained, should be allowed to run to waste, or worse. If but for their
health, the monks should be compelled to fight the next campaign.
The sun went down. Long horizontal shafts of golden light shot through
amidst the Alps; their snows glittered with a dazzling whiteness:
whiteness is a weak term;--it was a brilliant and lustrous glory, like
that of light itself. Anon a crimson blush ran along the chain. It
faded; it came again. A wall of burning peaks, from two to three hundred
miles in length, rose along the horizon. Eve, with her purple shadows,
drew on; and I left the mountains under a sky of vermilion, with Monte
Viso covering with its shadow the honoured dust that sleeps around it,
and pointing with its stony finger to that sky whither the spirits of
the martyred Vaudois have now ascended. It seemed to say, "Come and
see."