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.
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