d kindness, they managed to retain
him for a while; but he grew more odd and visionary, fasting often,
eating only herbs, and having divine revelations. After a dangerous
illness, which brought him to death's door, he did obtain his
dismissal from the Jesuit order in April 1639, and went over France
propagandizing. The Bishop of Amiens, caught by his eloquence, made
him prebendary of a collegiate church in that town; in connexion with
which, and with the Bishop's approval, he founded a religious
association of young women, called St. Mary Magdalene. All seemed to
go well for a time; but at length there was a scandal about him and a
girl in Abbeville, with a burst of similar scandals about his abuse
of the confessional for vicious purposes. To avoid arrest, he
absconded to Paris in August 1644, and thence to Bazas, where he
lived under a feigned name. But the Bishop of Bazas took him up; he
cleared himself to the Bishop and others, and defied his
calumniators. Only for a time; for again there were scandals, and he
was expelled the diocese. Going then to Toulouse, he gained the
confidence of the Archbishop there, who gave him charge of a convent
of nuns. In this post he developed more systematically his notions of
the religious life, described as a compound of Quietism and
Antinomianism, after the fashion of sects already known in France and
Germany, but with sexual extravangances which, when divulged, raised
an indignant storm. In November 1649, he had to abscond from
Toulouse; and, after various wanderings, in which he called himself
"Jean de Jesus Christ" and obtained popularity as a prophet, he came
to Montauban, and there publicly abjured Roman Catholicism in October
1650. Elected minister of the Protestant church of that town in 1652,
he lived there for some years in great esteem among the Protestants,
but in deadly feud with the Roman Catholics. The schism was such that
at last the magistrates had to banish him from the town as a
disturber of the peace. Then he had found refuge in Orange; and he
was in some kind of temporary Protestant pastorship in that town of
south-east France when there was this communication between him and
Milton.[1]

[Footnote 1: Article LABADIE in _Nouvelle Biographie Generale_
(1859), with additional information from Article on him in the
_Biographie Universelle_ (edit. 1819), and from _La Vie du
Sieur Jean Labadie_ by Bolsec (Lyon, 1664), and some passages in
Bayle's Dictionary (e.g. in