DAILL, JEAN, esteemed in his own day the greatest writer of the Reformed Church since the time of Calvin, was born at Chatelleraut, Jan. 6, 1594. After studying at Poitiers and Saumur, he became (in 1612) tutor to the grandsons of M. du Plessis Mornay, and he travelled with them for two years. He was ordained in 1623 ; married, and was made minister of the church at Saumur in 1625 ; in 1626 he was promoted to a church in Paris, where he laboured till 1670, in which year he died, at the age of 77. Further particulars respecting him, and especially his disputes with Des Mares and Spannheim about the ideal Uni versalism of Amyraut, may be seen in the Abre'gd de la Vie de Daillic by his son, and in the article about him in Bayle's Dictionary. Daille, an inde fatigable student, published no less than twenty volumes of sermons ; an des Synodes d'Alenron et de Charentan (1655), and a hook De objecto cultz2s religiosi, written in his 7oth year. Some of his volumes of sermons are expositions of books of Scripture, an exercise in which he ex celled. That on the Colossians and that on the Philippians have been translated into English ; the former appeared in 1672, with a preface by John Owen. A new edition was issued in 1841,
revised and corrected by the Rev. J. Sherman, who also translated the volume on Philippians. But Daille's chef d'oeuvre was his earliest work Do Vrai Emplai des Pbirs, 1631, translated into En glish by T. Smith, 1651. In this remarkable work, which was most favourably received among all English divines, and which is well known to every theological student, he shattered by irrefragable arguments, the unreasonable prestige of ' the Fathers,' shevving the corruptions which crept into the Christian religion after the first three centuries, and proving not only that the writings of `the Fathers' were full of forgeries, corruptions, and interpolations, but that their authority was incom petent, and often in particular cases `their evidence loose, their reasoning erroneous, and their inter pretations of Scripture contradictory and absurd' (Bishop Warburton).—F. W. F.