The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 71

active life, in expanding the mind and quickening the perceptions. From
their schools in the mountains some of the youth were sent to institutions
of learning in the cities of France or Italy, where was a more extended
field for study, thought, and observation than in their native Alps. The
youth thus sent forth were exposed to temptation, they witnessed vice,
they encountered Satan’s wily agents, who urged upon them the most
subtle heresies and the most dangerous deceptions. But their education
from childhood had been of a character to prepare them for all this.
In the schools whither they went, they were not to make confidants
of any. Their garments were so prepared as to conceal their greatest
treasure—the precious manuscripts of the Scriptures. These, the fruit of
months and years of toil, they carried with them, and whenever they
could do so without exciting suspicion, they cautiously placed some
portion in the way of those whose hearts seemed open to receive the
truth. From their mother’s knee the Waldensian youth had been trained
with this purpose in view; they understood their work and faithfully
performed it. Converts to the true faith were won in these institutions
of learning, and frequently its principles were found to be permeating
the entire school; yet the papal leaders could not, by the closest inquiry,
trace the so-called corrupting heresy to its source.
The spirit of Christ is a missionary spirit. The very first impulse
of the renewed heart is to bring others also to the Saviour. Such was
the spirit of the Vaudois Christians. They felt that God required more of
them than merely to preserve the truth in its purity in their own churches;
that a solemn responsibility rested upon them to let their light shine forth
to those who were in darkness; by the mighty power of God’s word they
sought to break the bondage which Rome had imposed. The Vaudois
ministers were trained as missionaries, everyone who expected to enter
the ministry being required first to gain an experience as an evangelist.
Each

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