Jacques Abbadie

Jakob Abbadie (1654? - September 25, 1727^[1]), also known as Jacques or James Abbadie, Swiss Protestant divine and writer, was born at Nay in Bern, Switzerland.

He studied at Sedan, Saumur and Puylaurens, with such success that he received the degree of doctor in theology at the age of seventeen.

After spending some years in Berlin as minister of a French Protestant church, where he had great success as a preacher, he accompanied Marshal Schomberg to England in 1688, and the following year became minister of the French church in the Savoy area of London.

His strong attachment to the cause of King William appears in his elaborate defence of the "Glorious Revolution" (Defense de la nation britannique, 1692) as well as in his history of the conspiracy of 1696 (Histoire de la grande conspiration d'Angleterre). The king promoted him to the deanery of Killaloe in Ireland.

He died in London in 1727.

Abbadie was a man of great ability and an eloquent preacher, but is best known by his religious treatises, several of which were translated from the original French into other languages and had a wide circulation throughout Europe. The most important of these are Traite de la verité de la religion chrétienne (1684); its continuation, Traité de la divinité de Jesus-Christ (1689); and L'Art de se connaitre soi-meme (1692). The latter work was translated into English as "The Art of knowing one-self" in 1695. The last 50 pages of this 274-page work deals with pride, which he divided into five branches: love of esteem, presumptuousness, vanity, ambition and arrogance.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Wikisource has an original article from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica about:

Abbadie, Jakob

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