Jean Daillé

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Jean Daillé [Dallaeus] (1594 – 1670), French Protestant divine, was born at Châtellerault and educated at Poitiers and Saumur.

From 1612 to 1621 he was tutor to two of the grandsons of Philippe de Mornay, sieur du Plessis Marly. Ordained to the ministry in 1623, he was for some time private chaplain to Du Plessis Mornay, whose memoirs he subsequently wrote. In 1625 Daillé was appointed minister of the church of Saumur, and in 1626 was chosen by the Paris consistory to be minister of the church of Charenton.

Of his works, which are principally controversial, the best known is the treatise Du vrai emploi des Pres (1631), translated into English by Thomas Smith under the title A Treatise concerning the right use of the Fathers (1651). The work attacks those who made the authority of the Fathers conclusive on matters of faith and practice. Daillé contends that the text of the Fathers is often corrupt, and that even when it is correct their reasoning is often illogical.

In his Sermons on the Philippians and Colossians, Daillé vindicated his claim to rank as a great preacher as well as an able controversialist. He was president of the last national synod held in France, which met at Loudun in 1659 (HM Baird, The Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1895, i. pp. 412 if.), when, as in the Apologie des Synodes d'Alençon et de Charenton (1655), he defended the universalism of Moses Amyraut. He wrote also Apologie pour les Eglises Réformes and La foi fondée sur les Saintes Écritures. His life was written by his son Adrien, who retired to Zürich at the revocation of the edict of Nantes.

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