Pierre Poiret

Here he became acquainted with Elisabeth, abbess of Herford, the granddaughter of James I of England and a noted mystic, with the Theologia Germanica, and with the writings of Antoinette Bourignon, which last supplied exactly what he wanted.

He settled in Amsterdam, and published there in the following year his Cogitationes rationales de Deo, anima, et Malo, which gained him an immediate reputation for scholarship and philosophic insight.

He accompanied her in her wanderings, traveled several times as far as Holstein in connection with her exceedingly confused affairs, and returned to Amsterdam to see to the publication of her complete works, to which he prefixed a thoroughgoing defense of her and added a translation of the Göttliche Gesicht of Hans Engelbrecht, the Brunswick enthusiast.

Another work, La Paix des ames dans tous les partis du Christianisme (1687), disregards the formal creeds of the various churches, and appeals to the minority of really sincere Christians, urging them to an inner union without the abandonment of their external affiliations.

The work which probably ran through the most editions was the little treatise on the education of children which first appeared in 1690 a collection of his shorter writings: was frequently translated, and influenced the Pietistic controversy at Hamburg.

He repudiated predestination, and condemned Pelagianism because it suppressed the feeling of inherent sinfulness in man — just as he opposed Socinianism because it did not ascribe the whole of salvation to the operation of God's grace.

His influence persisted after his death, not merely through the work of his spiritual son Tersteegen, but through the respect which his writings won for mysticism, forcing the regular theology, as represented by Le Clerc, Lange, Buddeus, Walch, and Johann Friedrich Stapfer, to take account of it.