Henceforth Labadie became a secular priest, first in France where he met with unusual success and later in Holland where he was received with still greater honor. From Holland he went to Geneva, where he gained his most influential convert, Pierre Yvon who, after the death of Labadie, became his suc- cessor as head of the sect. At Geneva he also made converts of John Schurman and his talented and accomplished sister, Anna Maria who, it is said, read prose and verse in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and a half dozen of the modern European languages. It was Anna Maria Schurman who wrote the principle book on Labadism, “Eucleria”.[1] In Amsterdam, though Labadie met with unusual success in gaining new converts, he was cautioned by the magistrates to confine his ministry to his own followers. Not satisfied with such a limited following and ever eager to spread and propagate what he believed to be the true doctrines, he emigrated to Wiewerd in Friesland where the daughters of Cornelis van Arsen presented him with Malta House, an old castle. Henceforth Wiewerd became the capital of the Labadist domains and so remained as long as the sect was extant.
It appears that there was some similarity between the tenets of Labadism and Quakerism. William Penn is said to have visited Wiewerd and was impressed at the similarity of the religious and social ceremonies promulgated by Labadie to his own. Later Robert Barclay and George Keith visited Labadie and invited him and his followers to join the Quakers. The request was refused.[2] In their social organization they were communal, owning no private property or article which they would not surrender to the organization as a whole. At first, it
