ink, and paper supplied to him, with which to write a petition to the Council. Calvin on this agreed to leave the volumes he had brought into Court in the hands of the prisoner, and the Judges ordered that any others he required should be purchased for him at his proper cost. The jailer finally was directed to supply him with writing materials; the paper, however, being limited to a single sheet! and to see particularly to his being kept secluded-indication in either case, we must presume, that the prisoner was believed not to lack friends or prompters from whom Calvin thought it would be well to keep him apart.

CHAPTER VI.

THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE-Continued.

WHEN the Court assembled, on August 23, a series of articles, embodying what may be characterised as a new Act of Impeachment, was presented to it by M. Rigot the Attorney-General, headed as follows: These are the questions and articles on which the Attorney-General of Geneva proposes to interrogate Michael Servetus, prisoner, accused of heresy, blasphemy, and disturbance of the peace of Christendom.'

The

The questions and articles now presented differ materially from those proposed in the first instance by Calvin in the name of his man, Nicolas de la Fontaine. These, we have seen, refer almost exclusively to the speculative theological opinions of Servetus, his disrespectful treatment of Calvin, and his challenge of the doctrine preached in the Church of Geneva. articles of the Attorney-General bear on matters more purely personal to the prisoner; on his antecedents; his relations with the theologians of Basle and Germany; the printing of his books, more particularly the last of them, and the fatal consequences that must follow from its publication; his coming to Geneva, and

so on. Save his views on Infant Baptism, his other dogmatical opinions are not particularly specified or brought prominently forward; and his differences with Calvin and the Church of Geneva are not even hinted

The theological element in the prosecution, in a word, is almost entirely abandoned for denunciations of the socially dangerous nature of the prisoner's doctrines, and his persistence in their dissemination.

In the present mood of the Court, and aspect of the prosecution, it would almost seem that had Servetus been guilty of nothing more than offences in the region of speculative theology and the use of uncivil language towards Calvin and the Church of Geneva, his delinquencies would not have put him beyond the pale of escape from all but punishment of a secondary or insignificant kind. The Attorney-General's articles appear in fact to have been framed under the mistaken idea that Servetus, through the whole course of his life, had been an immoral and so a dangerous and turbulent spirit, of the kind with which he was himself, perhaps, but too familiar in the City of Geneva. He did not, any more than Calvin and the other Reformers, think of Servetus as he was in truth-a speculative, yet perfectly pious scholar, intent on bringing the Reformation of Christian doctrine, begun by Luther, still nearer to the simplicity of Apostolic, or even of pre-Apostolic, times; for Michael Servetus had the mind to see and to say that there was a Christian Religion, based on love of God and man, with added faith in its Author,

before there were any Gospels; so that these are truly but the varying and often discrepant reports of the Master's teaching, with mythological accretions and interpolated Greek philosophoumena.

Rigot appears from his articles, which have no look of having been dictated by Calvin, to have regarded Servetus as one whose efforts from first to last had been directed to the confusion of society through the teaching of an immoral doctrine and the example of a dissolute life. To force an avowal of so much from the lips of the prisoner himself was therefore the main drift of the Attorney's interrogatories. Must not the prisoner be aware, said he, that his teaching gives licence to youth to overflow in debauchery, adultery, and other social crimes, as he maintains that there is neither sin nor misdemeanour in such misdeeds, and no punishment due to them under the age of twenty years? Why had he not himself entered into the holy state of matrimony? Had he not studied the Koran and other profane books for arguments in favour of Jews, Turks, and the like, and to controvert the doctrines of all the Christian Churches? Had he not been imprisoned elsewhere than at Vienne through having been guilty of various crimes and misdemeanours? Had he not been a party to quarrels in which he had wounded another as well as been wounded himself? If he had not led a dissolute and immoral life, showing neither care nor zeal for all that became a Christian, what could have induced him to treat adversely so much

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that lies at the root of the Christian Religion? Had he not come, in fact, to Geneva with a view to spread his doctrines and to trouble the Church as there established? With whom had he had communication since he came? Had he not spoken with William Geroult, and was not Geroult aware of his intention to come to Geneva? and so on, in the same strain, the questions amounting to as many as thirty.

But this was ground on which Servetus felt himself secure; he could reply to all that was asked of him now with a clear conscience, and without reticence or prevarication. He had nothing to hide in his past life. No moral delinquency had been laid to his charge, and though he may have had a squabble with the Faculty of Paris, the doctors were notoriously a contentious crew, always quarrelling among themselves, though they never, like the theologians, went the length of burning one another. There was little, therefore, to be said on that head; for the rest, he had lived soberly, honourably, industriously; earning his bread in the sweat of his brain, and for the last twelve or fourteen years had been incessantly engaged in the practice of his profession, neither using the sword nor the spear, but salving the bruises and stanching the wounds that men in their madness inflict on one another, and nobly ministering to the yet longer list of ills in the shape of fevers, fluxes, consumptions, apoplexies, cancers, dropsies, &c., &c., that waylay us on our course and give us rest at length.