I Have Never Yet Had The Chance Of
Doing This; For, Though I Am Fairly Quick At Seeing Whether I
Am
likely to get on with a priest or no, I find the priest is
generally fairly quick too; and
I am no sooner in a diligence or
railway carriage with an unsympathetic priest, than he curls
himself round into a moral ball and prays horribly - bristling out
with collects all over like a cross-grained spiritual hedgehog.
Partly, therefore, from having no wish to go out of my way to make
myself obnoxious, and partly through the opposite party being
determined that I shall not get the chance, the question about La
Torre Pellice has never come off, and I do not know what a priest
would say if the subject were introduced, - but I did get a talking
about La Torre Pellice all the same.
I was going from Turin to Pinerolo, and found myself seated
opposite a fine-looking elderly gentleman who was reading a paper
headed, "Le Temoin, Echo des Vallees Vaudoises": for the Vaudois,
or Waldenses, though on the Italian side of the Alps, are French in
language and perhaps in origin. I fell to talking with this
gentleman, and found he was on his way to La Torre Pellice, the
headquarters of indigenous Italian evangelicism. He told me there
were about 25,000 inhabitants of these valleys, and that they were
without exception Protestant, or rather that they had never
accepted Catholicism, but had retained the primitive Apostolic
faith in its original purity. He hinted to me that they were
descendants of some one or more of the lost ten tribes of Israel.
The English, he told me (meaning, I gather, the English of the
England that affects Exeter Hall), had done great things for the
inhabitants of La Torre at different times, and there were streets
called the Via Williams and Via Beckwith. They were, he said, a
very growing sect, and had missionaries and establishments in all
the principal cities in North Italy; in fact, so far as I could
gather, they were as aggressive as malcontents generally are, and,
Italians though they were, would give away tracts just as readily
as we do. I did not, therefore, go to La Torre.
Sometimes priests say things, as a matter of course, which would
make any English clergyman's hair stand on end. At one town there
is a remarkable fourteenth-century bridge, commonly known as "The
Devil's Bridge." I was sketching near this when a jolly old priest
with a red nose came up and began a conversation with me. He was
evidently a popular character, for every one who passed greeted
him. He told me that the devil did not really build the bridge. I
said I presumed not, for he was not in the habit of spending his
time so well.
"I wish he had built it," said my friend; "for then perhaps he
would build us some more."
"Or we might even get a church out of him," said I, a little slyly.
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