Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 | Page 7

the king. In the year 1645 he was cited to appear at court along with his friend, the Bishop of Amiens, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, which sentence was modified on an appeal made by the assembly of the clergy of France then in session. He was, however, ordered to renounce his opinions and to refrain from preaching for a period of years. In one of his treatises he states that during a second forced retirement he obtained and read a copy of Calvin's Institutes. This had a determining influence upon his after career.[11] He summed up the result of his solitary reflections in the words, "This is the last time that Rome shall persecute me in her communion. Up to the present I have endeavored to help and to heal her, remaining within her jurisdiction; but now it is full time for me to denounce her and to testify against her."
[Footnote 10: Déclaration de la Foi, pp. 84, 122, 123.]
[Footnote 11: Traité de la Solitude Chrétienne.]
At Montauban in 1650 Labadie abjured his former faith and was later ordained a Protestant minister. According to Mollerus[12] the acquisition of the widely famous preacher was heralded as the greatest Protestant triumph since the days of Calvin. Banished from France in 1657, Labadie preached for two years at Orange (then independent) and for seven years at Geneva, whence he was called to the pastorate of the Walloon Reformed Church in Middelburg, Zeeland. At Middelburg he became embroiled with the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, because of controversial writings and because, filled with zeal to reform the Reformed Church in the Netherlands and to awaken it from its formalism, he carried his own congregation into positions and practices manifestly tending toward schism. Driven out of Middelburg, he established a church at Veere, which he styled the Evangelical. The States of Zeeland kept the troublesome preacher on the move, and Labadie journeyed to Amsterdam, where he had an opportunity to establish a communal society, of which the chief ornament was Anna Maria van Schurman of Utrecht, famed as the most learned woman of her day.[13]
[Footnote 12: Cimbria Litterata, III. 37.]
[Footnote 13: Her Eukleria seu Melioris Partis Electio (Altona, 1673) is perhaps the chief authority for the history of the Labadists from this point on.]
The church at Amsterdam grew and prospered, and overtures were received from many sectaries, including the Society of Friends, all of which Labadie declined to consider. It may here be remarked that similar overtures made by representatives of the Society of Friends to the colony later established in Maryland were likewise unfruitful. Certain disorders arising, the civil authorities placed such restrictions upon the church at Amsterdam that another removal became expedient. At this juncture, in 1670, an invitation was received from the Princess Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Frederick V., Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, and granddaughter of King James I. of England. Elizabeth[14] was Protestant abbess of Herford in Westphalia, and placed quarters in that town at the disposal of the Labadists, but on account of certain religious excesses and the suspicions aroused in the minds of townspeople and neighbors, the Imperial Diet caused the Labadists to remove. Some of them tarried for a while at Bremen but the majority sought refuge immediately at Altona, then under the King of Denmark, in 1672. At this place, in February, 1674, Labadie died. His death evoked estimates of his work and worth from high ecclesiastical sources, and much of this was of a laudatory nature. The Dutch historians are disposed to regard Labadie's chief work the leavening of the old lump by the many hundreds of his converts inspired with his evangelical zeal, who remained in connection with the Reformed Church.[15]
[Footnote 14: For this princess, see Guhrauer's article in the Historisches Taschenbuch for 1850, and Miss Elizabeth Godfrey's A Sister of Prince Rupert.]
[Footnote 15: H. van Berkum, De Labadie en de Labadisten (Sneek, 1851), II. 170 et seq. The history of the sect can be followed in Van Berkum, in the first volume of Ritschl's Geschichte des Pietismus (Bonn, 1880), and in Ypeij and Dermout, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Hervormde Kerk (Breda, 1827), vol. III.]
The next removal of the Labadists was to Wieuwerd in Friesland, the northernmost of the Dutch provinces, where they were established under the lead of Pierre Yvon on an estate called Thetinga or Waltha House, which was tendered to them by three ladies devotedly attached to their teachings, the three youngest daughters of the great diplomatist Francis Aarsen, Lord of Sommelsdyk. Here the communal sect attained its full measure of strength, declined, and died. For more than half a century Wieuwerd was the seat of the new church and from it feeble colonies were established at various centres. From Wieuwerd proceeded the colonists who settled in Maryland, and from Wieuwerd