labadist

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A follower of Jean de Labadie (1610–74), a Jesuit, afterward a mystic Protestant preacher in France and Holland. The Labadists were Christian communists. Among their tenets were denial of the obligation of sabbath observance, on the ground that life is a perpetual sabbath; belief in the direct influence of the Holy Spirit: and belief in marriage as a holy ordinance valid only among believers, the children of the regenerate being born without original sin. The sect disappeared about the middle of the eighteenth century.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Eccl. Hist.) A follower of Jean de Labadie, a religious teacher of the 17th century, who left the Roman Catholic Church and taught a kind of mysticism, and the obligation of community of property among Christians.