The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.

The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.

On Thursday, April 21, the day of the dreadful double rendezvous, and of Desborough’s stormy interview with Richard in Whitehall to compel the dissolution of the Parliament, Milton, in his house in Petty France, on the very edge of the uproar, was quietly dictating a private letter.  It is that numbered 28 among his Epistoloe Familiares, and headed “Joanni Badioeo, Pastori Arausionensi,” i.e.  “To John Badiaeus, Pastor of Orange.”  With some trouble, I have identified this “Badiaeus” with a certain French JEAN LABADIE, who is characterized by Bayle as a “schismatic minister, followed like an apostle,” and by another authority as “one of the most dangerous fanatics of the seventeenth century.”  The facts of his life, to the moment of our present concern with him, are given in the accepted French authorities thus:—­Born in 1610 at Bourg-en-Guyenne, the son of a soldier who had risen to be lieutenant, he had received a Jesuit education at Bordeaux, had entered the Jesuit order at an early age, and had become a priest.  For fifteen years he had remained in the order, preaching, and also teaching rhetoric and philosophy, reputed “a prodigy of talent and piety,” but also a mystic and enthusiast, with fancies that he must found a new religious sect.  While preaching orthodox Catholicism in public, he had been indoctrinating disciples in private with his peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to leave the Jesuits.  By reasonings and 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

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.