WHILST Father Lodensteyn was still a little boy at Delft, and concerned as yet with no weightier matters than tops and marbles, another boy, ten years older, was studying a Latin Bible, and looking back with a sorrowful heart to the early days of the Church.
This boy was a novice in a Jesuit college at Bordeaux. His father, John Charles de Labadie, a man of noble family, and governor of Guyenne, had sent him with his two brothers to this college in the year 1616, intending to bring him up for the law. Little John, then six years old, was a small, delicate boy. But his fiery southern blood, his extraordinary talents, and his indomitable will, marked him out as one who was not to be shaped according to the plans of any man.
The Jesuits had only lately returned to France, after their banishment in the year 1595. The history of the early days of their order is full of strange contradictions. Their task was to restore the Church.
Did this mean to reconquer the nations who had separated from Rome by the preaching of the reformers ? Or did it mean to stir up afresh the first love of the first ages ? Did it mean a crusade against worldliness, and lukewarmness, and sin ?
There were earnest and pious men and women who had brought themselves to believe that if it meant the former, it also meant the latter. And there were, perhaps, the more of these men and women, in consequence of the little streams of living water which flowed from the teaching of the reformers, through dark and dry places, and some weary souls drank and were refreshed, not knowing the source from whence they came. They heard of the love of God, and the free grace that saves the lost, and they loved Him because He had first loved them.
Many of these stray sheep of Christ flocked to the Jesuit fathers, to be received into the order that was to revive the Church, and reconquer tile heretic nations.
But ignorant devotion takes strange shapes. It is fashioned by the human heart and mind, rather than by the Spirit of God. And the Word of God was little known to these devoted people. They were like ships without a compass. That they became wild and mystical was almost a necessity in such a case.
Their mysticism and superstition were turned to account by the skill of the Jesuits, who had a far different ambition. They could use them to gain the worldly power they craved. It would serve their purpose to have shining examples of saints who saw visions, and dreamt dreams, and worked miracles, to oppose to the prosaic worthies, and the dry doctors of the Protestants.
For one who would be attracted by the example of good Dr. Voet, would there not be hundreds who would be entranced with the history of S. Rose of Lima ; of S. Francis Borgia ; of many wonderful men and women, who talked to angels and departed saints, and performed impossibilities just as easily as other people ate and walked ? Were not such holy people a certain proof that to be a Catholic was worth the while ? But why be a Protestant, who must be contented with the dead level of common matter-of-fact daily life ? The Pope himself therefore gave his sanction for a time to those who went by the name of " mystics " and " quietists." Later on it was otherwise ; for amidst their errors and superstitions the eternal life that is from God moved and acted in these His children, and could not be fitted and fashioned according to the iron framework of Catholicism. But whilst John de Labadie was still a child, the mystics were not only tolerated, but reverenced.
Thus there were many strange histories, and wonderful sayings and doings, talked of in the Jesuit College, which would work on the feelings and the imagination of a boy like John de Labadie.
"I believed," he says, "that I was sanctified from the womb to reform the Christian religion, and from my early childhood I was moved by the working of the Holy Spirit, though, like Samuel, I did not, by reason of my tender years, know from whence it came. Whilst with the Jesuits I learnt, through the Holy Ghost, true prayer and contemplation, and God gave me to speak in a way which edified others, of the mysteries of the gospel."
The gospel, however, known to Labadie was dim and clouded. It is true that Jesus, Jesus only, was the object of his heart and mind. But, as in the case of many of the mystics, it was rather love to the person of Christ, than faith in the work of Christ, which filled his soul. The reverse might be said of many doctrinal Protestants, but the unhindered teaching of the Holy Ghost will produce both the one and the other. And we may be assured that, in this case, the one will be deeper and fuller in proportion to the depth and fulness of the other.
Meanwhile he read eagerly, in the breviaries and other devotional books, all the passages which were taken from the Bible. Later on he became possessed of a whole Latin Bible, and he also read the writings of Augustine and Bernard, and the lives of the saints. And at the same time he looked around him to observe how far the Church resembled the accounts he read of the early days when Peter and Paul preached the gospel of God.
If there was any one who remained in ignorance that the Church had fallen from her first estate, and had lost her first love, that person was not John de Labadie. " I saw clearly," he says, " that the first Christian assemblies were the model according to which the corrupt Church must be reformed."
But to be a reformer, he believed it to be needful he should be a Jesuit, and not a lawyer. His father refused to consent to this ; but John resolved to obey God, as he believed, rather than man. He was scarcely fifteen when he joined the order, though without taking the vows which bound him for life. Soon after, his father died, and he was now free to follow his own determinations,