RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Laud Lavater
LAURENTIUS VALLA. See Valla.
LAVAL-MONTMORENCY, la'val"-men"mo"ran"si', FRANCOIS XAVIER DE: First French bishop in Canada; b. at Montigny-sur-Avre, department of Eure-et-Loir, France, Apr. 30, 1623; d. in Quebec May 6, 1708. He received the tonsure at the age of nine, and a canonry of Evreux at fifteen. Renouncing his rights as heir to the ancient name and estates of his family, he pursued his ecclesiastical career, and was ordained priest in 1647 and made archdeacon of Evreux. In 1653 he was chosen as one of three French bishops to be sent to the Indies, and spent fifteen months in Rome awaiting consecration, but the opposition of the Portuguese government brought the plan to nothing. In 1659 he was sent to Canada as vicar-apostolic, with the title of bishop of Petrsea in partibus, and from his first arrival there (with the exception of three visits to France to regulate the affairs of his mission and to obtain from the government humane treatment of the aborigines) was active until his death in pastoral and missionary labors. In 1663 he founded the Seminary of Quebec, to which the king assigned tithes that were to be used in supplying clergy for the whole province. The see of Quebec, the first diocesan bishopric in Canada, was founded in 1674, with jurisdiction over all the French possessions in North America. Worn out by his arduous tasks, which were made harder by conflicts with Frontenac and other secular authorities, he resigned his see into the hands of a younger man in 1684, but continued to make himself useful in the affairs of the seminary and the mission until his death. Laval University at Montreal, founded in 1852, was named in his honor. In 1878 his remains were transferred from the cathedral to the seminary; and in pursuance of the investigation connected with the process for his canonization, the coffin was opened in 1901, when his body was found in a perfect state of preservation.
Bibliography: H. J. Morgan, Sketches of Celebrated Canadians and Persons Connected with Canada, pp. 14 sqq., Montreal, 1865; H. TStu, Monseigneur de Laval, premier evique de Quebec, Paris, 1887; A. Gosselin, Le Venerable Francois de Laval . : sa vie et ses vertus, Quebec, 1890; A. Leblond de Brumath, Bishop Laval, Toronto, 1906.
LAVATER, la-va'ter, JOHANN CASPAR: Poet and theologian, perhaps best known as founder of the " art of physiognomy," was born at Zurich Nov. 15, 1741; d. there Jan. 2, 1801. He grew up in an atmosphere of good breeding and earnest piety and
early displayed a decidedly religious Life. nature. At the gymnasium in Zurich
he had as his teachers Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger (q.v.), the ardent standard-bearers of a poetical art that had its wellsprings in refined sensibility. Bodmer entered into close personal relations with Lavater and awakened his enthusiasm for friendship and virtue, for free political ideals, and for the poetry of Klopstock and Young. His theological growth and thought were greatly influenced by Bishop Butler, Samuel Clarke, and their German devotees. In the spring of 1762 he was admitted to the ministerium of Zurich. The same year occurred his ac-
tion against a certain district ruler, whom he accused before the council of oppression and fraud. A trip to Germany and a sojourn of nine months in the Pomeranian village Barth, where he studied with J. J. Spalding, removed him from the agitations which that legal action left in its train. On his return to Zurich in 1764 he busied himself in literary labors of a practical pastoral character. Under the title Der Erinnerer he issued an ethical weekly, which was largely a product of his own pen. Though yearning for the spiritual calling it was not till 1769 that he received his first appointment as assistant at the Orphan House Church, Zurich. He succeeded to the pastorate in 1775. In 1778 he was called as assistant at St. Peter's, Zurich; and in 1786 he was made pastor of this famous church and a member of the consistory.
Lavater assembled beneath his pulpit a large congregation every Sunday, attracted by his naturalness of delivery, by the direct and practical matter of his sermons, and by the spiritual affluence and personal conviction of the preacher. With his warm interest in every individual, his psychological delicacy of feeling, and his hearty love of man, he was a pastor quite unique. Not residents alone, but many strangers chose him as counselor for their inner life; and his pastoral correspondence grew to enormous proportions. He seldom left Zurich, but he frequently offered hospitality to old and new friends in his house. In the summer of 1774, at Bad Ems, he met Goethe, Basedow, and Jung Stilling; in 1786 he accompanied his son to Bremen; and in 1793 he acceded to an invitation of Count Bernstorff to visit Copenhagen. His closing years are interwoven with the great events which brought on the downfall of the ancient Swiss Confederacy. At the outset Lavater hailed the French Revolution as the dawn of popular freedom. Later, however, the "liberators'" deeds of violence filled him with indignation. An act of great boldness was his Wort eines freien Schweizers an die franzosische Nation (Eng., Fr., and Germ., London, 1798), a tract of arraignment that he sent on May 10, 1798, to the French director Reubell. There was no procedure against him immediately; but in the following year he was banished to Basel. He was at home again, when on Sept. 28, 1799, the French triumphed over the allies near Zurich. The French entered the city and a soldier asked Lavater for some wine; but hardly had he received it when he shot Lavater through the breast, and this wound ultimately caused his death. A few days after his departure each of his friends received a memorial verse that he had devised for them as a farewell greeting.
Lavater's intercourse with German scholars confirmed in him a tendency to abstain from dogmatic forms of expression in religious matters. His own point of view was distinctly that of a mystic, though he held rigidly to the Bible. All illib-
Religious erality and petty disputatiousness was Views. repulsive to him. It was this that set him at odds with the Pietists and the Moravian school. From the observation, made in 1768, that in the New Testament the divine communications of power bear a sensibly supernatural
Lavater
Law and Gospel