of Labadie’s life, in the ordinary accounts of him, lessen the wonder.—­Labadie did not come to London, as Milton had hoped.  When he received Milton’s letter, he was on the wing for Geneva, where he arrived in June 1659, and where he continued his preaching.  Here, in the very city where Morus had once been, there still were commotions round him; and, after new wanderings in Germany, we find him at Middleburg in Holland in 1666, thus again by chance in a town where Morus had been before him.  At Middleburg he seems to have attained his widest celebrity, gathering a body of admirers and important adherents, the chief of whom was “Mademoiselle Schurmann, so versed in the learned languages.”  At length a quarrel with M. de Wolzogue, minister of the Walloon church at Utrecht, brought Labadie into difficulties with the Walloon Synod and with the State authorities, and he migrated to Erfurt, and thence to Altona, where he died in 1674, “in the arms of Mademoiselle Schurmann,” who had followed him to the last.  He left a sect called The Labadists, who were strong for a time, and are perhaps not yet extinct.  Among the beliefs they inherited from him are said to have been these:—­(1) That God may and does deceive man; (2) That Scripture is not necessary to salvation, the immediate action of the Spirit on souls being sufficient; (3) That there ought to be no Baptism of Infants; (4) That truly spiritual believers are not bound by law and ceremonies; (5) That Sabbath-observance is unnecessary, all days being alike; (6) That the ordinary Christian Church is degenerate and decrepit.  One sees here something like a French Quakerism, but with ingredients from older Anabaptism.  Had Milton’s letter had the intended effect, the sect might have had its home in London.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Nouvelle Biographie Generale, as before.—­It is to be remembered that Milton himself authorized the publication of his letter to Badiaeus with his other Latin Familiar Epistles in 1674 (see Vol.  I. p. 239).  By that time he must have known the whole subsequent career of Labadie and all the reports about him; and he cannot even then have thought ill of him or of Mad’lle Schurmann.  To the end, he liked all bold schismatics and sectaries, if they took a forward direction.]

Virtually at an end on the 22nd of April by the enforced dissolution of the Parliament, Richard’s Protectorate was more visibly at an end on the 7th of May, when the Wallingford-House chiefs agreed with the Republicans in restoring the Rump.  Eight days after that event Milton was called on to write two letters for the new Republican authorities.  They were as follows:—­