Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/110



A life of Augustine Herrman, no matter how brief, would be incomplete without an account of the extraordinary religious sect called the Labadists and the sequence of events that caused them to settle at Bohemia Manor.

The story of the Labadists is not unlike that of many other Protestant sects that grew out of the Reformation in Holland and elsewhere as a result of differences as to government, doctrines and social and religious discipline. In all its essentials Labadism did not differ much from all those other religious sects produced about the same time. Its tenets consisted of many good points, with many shortcomings that the processes of time and condition exposed. Jean de Labadie was the main guiding force of the order and after his death it disintegrated as rapidly as it arose. He was born at Bordeaux, France in 1610 and was educated at a Jesuit college. He was still young when he declared that he had visions and received messages direct from God, Who revealed to him that he was to establish a new and “only real church”. He began to lead a life of asceticism, fasting for long intervals and eating only herbs. As a result of these privations his health became impaired and his mind suffered as a consequence. He made himself so objectionable to the orthodox priests that in order to get rid of him they gave him an honorable dismissal from the Jesuit order.