FAMILISTI. - A Protestant sect existing in Holland and England between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was founded between 1539 and 1540 by one Enrico Niclaes, a native of Münster, and spread in England under the reign of Elizabeth.
In 1575 Niclaes published his profession of faith, in which he declared that Hope had reigned with Moses, Faith with Christ, and that there must now begin
the kingdom of Charity. The followers of Niclaes, who constituted the Familia charitatis (whence their designation as F.), believed that the practice of Charity was to make them participants in divinity itself. Familist preaching died out after a few years, for by the middle of the seventeenth century there is no further trace of II. Niclaes’s most distinguished disciple was the celebrated Antwerp printer, Cristoforo Plantin.