The history of the Waldenses - v. 1 Author:William Jones Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Preface to the First Edition. xi -t ... . , It may possibly strike some readers with surprise that no notice is taken, in the following pages, of a multipl... more »icity of sects which arose, from time to time, in what is called the Christian world, and whose history occupies so very large a space in the volumes of most of our modern writers on thj$ subject. But to speak the truth, my opinion of these in general is, that they have nothing to do with the history of the church or kingdom of Christ; and that to connect them with it, as Dr. Mosheim and others have done, is scarcely more unwise than the conduct of Mr. Hume would have been, had he incorporated the Tyburn Chronicle into his valuable History of England., . . i In tracing the kingdom of Christ in the world, I have paid no regard whatever to the long disputed subject of apostolical succession. I have, indeed, read much that has been written upon it by the Catholic writers on one side, and by Dr. Allix, Sir Samuel Morland, and several Protestants on the other; and I regret the labour that has been so fruitlessly expended by the latter, persuaded as I am that the postulatum is a imere fiction, and that the ground on which the Protestant writers have proceeded in contending for it, is altogether untenable. It is admitted, that the,.Most High has had his churches and people in every age, since the decease of the Apostles; but to attempt to trace a regular suc- cessidn of ordained bishops in the vallies ofPiedmont, or any other country, is " labouring in the fire for very vanity," and seems to me to proceed upon mistaken views of the nature of the kingdom of Christ, and of the sovereignty of God, in his operations in the earth, as they have rer spect unto it. Jesus himself, in reply to an inr quiry put to him by the Pharisees, (...« less