A Curious History

with the Virgin Mary, and of being honored by her visits, and while he occupied himself with all the acts of Papistic Idolatry A derogatory term used by Protestant writers of the era to describe Roman Catholic practices, particularly the veneration of saints and the Eucharist., according to the institute of his Society The "Society" refers to the Jesuits (The Society of Jesus)., he nevertheless learned from God the exercise of meditation and prayer, more by the infusion of grace than by the effort of nature, in which, he says in his Declaration Labadie published several "Declarations" or public statements explaining his conversion from Catholicism to the Reformed (Protestant) faith. reprinted in Geneva in the year 1666, his Spirit always anticipated him rather than his own spirit going to seek it. He was already so enlightened among the Jesuits by the Spirit of light and love toward JESUS CHRIST, and subsequently so strongly attached to His conduct and His doctrine, that he esteemed the one as his wisdom and the other as his science; and before applying himself to the study called Theology, he had learned its most sublime Mysteries by a knowledge almost infused, without study and without books, having been very particularly raised to the knowledge of the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the economy of salvation, gratuitous predestination, the meditation and offices of Jesus, the greatness of His person and the secrets of His life, and so enlightened by God on the strength of His grace and its operations in hearts, on His habitation through Faith and through His Spirit in His own, etc., so that he was able to write substantial treatises on these matters even then, during the time of his Novitiate.

One would have to copy this entire declaration of his, which he published to justify his change [of religion] and to express the causes that had

had moved him to leave the communion of Rome to embrace our own, if we were to represent how much Enthusiasm In the 17th century, "Enthusiasm" was often a negative term for someone who claimed to receive direct, private revelations from God, bypassing church authority. and the imagination of a quite particular guidance by the spirit of God in all his actions has possessed his mind at all times—even at the time when he was immersed, in heart and body, in the most detestable Idolatry and in the most pernicious society of Papism. This will never accord with what the Apostle Saint Paul said in 2 Corinthians 6:14 and following: what fellowship has light with darkness, what accord has Christ with Belial, and what agreement has the Temple of God with Idols? original: "quelle communication y a-t'il de la lumiere avec les tenebres, quel accord de Christ avec Belial, & quelle convenance du Temple de Dieu avec les Idoles?" It suffices to remark that he attributes to the Holy Spirit the ardent zeal he had to become a Priest—that is to say, in effect, to make himself a sacrificer to the Idol—even to the point of imagining that when he received [holy] orders, he had felt more in his spirit the interior unction of the spirit of God than the exterior one with which the Bishop anointed him to confer it upon him. He had expressed all this in the first edition of this declaration of his in stronger terms, for which the Missionary Mauduit Michel Mauduit, a Catholic polemicist who wrote against Labadie. reproached him in the year 1664. But in the edition of the year 1666, he slipped in these four words in parentheses: So it seems to me, as if to warn us, without thinking about it, that this salutary clause must be understood in everything he usually attributes to the movements and operations of the