Labadists

However, at that time the Jesuits were wary of overt spiritual manifestations,[1] so Labadie, who himself experienced frequent visions and inner enlightenment, found himself dissatisfied and left the order in 1639.

He had fleeting links with the Oratoire, then Jansenism (on occasions staying with the solitaries of Port-Royal, who received him at the time but later sought to dissociate themselves from him).

He was a parish priest and evangelist in the southern French dioceses of Toulouse and Bazas, preaching social righteousness, new birth, and separation from worldliness.

In that city, and then in the principality of Orange, he championed the rights of the Protestant minority in the face of increasing legislation against them by Louis XIV (which would culminate in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau).

Here too he made contact with leading figures of the spiritual and reformatory circles of the day, such as Jan Amos Comenius, and Antoinette Bourignon.

[citation needed] With a broad-mindedness unusual for the period, Labadie was gracious and cautiously welcoming towards the move of repentance and new zeal among many Jews in a Messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi in 1667.

The best known of Labadist writings was not Labadie's but Anna van Schurman's, who wrote a justification of her renunciation of fame and reputation to live in Christian community.

One member, Hendrik van Deventer,[7] skilled in chemistry and medicine, set up a laboratory at the house and treated many people, including Christian V, the King of Denmark.

One was Sophia of Hanover, mother of King George I of Great Britain; another was William Penn, the Quaker pioneer, who gave his name to the US state of Pennsylvania; a third was the English philosopher John Locke.

[11] It is a valuable early account of life in colonial New Netherland (later New York), on the Chesapeake and the Delaware in 1679–80 and includes several hand drawings and maps.

Danckaerts and Schlüter met the son of Augustine Herman, a successful Maryland businessman, in New York and he introduced them to his father in 1679.

Chiefly these were: William Penn records in his journal a meeting with the Labadists in 1677, which gives an insight into the reasons why these people chose to live a communal lifestyle.

Labadie's widow, Lucia, testified to Penn about her younger days in which she had mourned the insipid state of the Christianity which she saw around her: If God would make known to me his way, I would trample upon all the pride and glory of the world.

August Francke, professor at Halle University, founded there an orphanage (the Waisenhaus) in 1696, to be run along Christian communitarian lines, with equality and sharing of goods.