begins in this way:

That he may corrupt the saying of the apostle,' &c.; XVII.: To say that God is Father of the Holy Ghost, is to confound the persons,' &c.; XVIII.: To show that he plays with the word person,' &c.; XXXV.: 'After jumbling together many insane and pernicious notions on the substance of the soul,' &c.; XXXVIII. That he has written and published horrible blasphemies against the baptism of infants,' &c. Calvin, in short, could not resist the opportunity of helping the Judges to a conclusion in consonance with his own views, and therefore adverse to those of his opponent.

When we turn to Calvin's Refutation of the Errors of Michael Servetus, we observe him setting out by saying that he will not imitate the prisoner in the use of uncivil language, but confine himself strictly to the matters in question. He would not be John Calvin, however, did he keep his word; and truly his language is at times little less offensive than that of Servetus; whilst his comments, uniformly adverse, are ever studiously calculated to damage the prisoner in the eyes of his Judges. 'Whosoever,' says Calvin in concluding his work, 'will duly weigh all that is here adduced, will not fail to see that the whole purpose of Servetus has been to extinguish the light we have in the true doctrine, and so put an end to all religion.' But we, for our part, say, after some pains bestowed, that whoever peruses the writings of Servetus without a foregone conclusion that any one among the various formu

lated systems of religious doctrine he sees around him is the ABSOLUTE TRUTH, and alone essential to constitute Religiousness, will not fail to discover that not only had Servetus no thought of putting out the light of religion in the world, but that he was animated by a most earnest desire, through another interpretation of the Records which he, too, looked on as Revelations from God, to set Christianity on another, and, as he believed, a better foundation than it had yet obtained from the labours of Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the Reformers. Servetus was, in truth, but one among the host of Reformers of every shade and colour who made their appearance on the field at the trumpet-call of Luther, and who had but this in common: hostility to the ignorance and immorality of monk and priest, to the pride and lust and abuse of power so conspicuous in Pope and Roman Hierarch. And shall we in these days think of him as impious and irreligious who held that it was less than reasonable to speak of the coeternity of a Father and a Son, taking the words in any common-sense acceptation; and that a single entity could not be conceived as subdivided into three distinct entities or persons, without loss of its essential unity, nor three distinct entities or persons be thought of as amalgamated into one without loss of their several individualities? Who said, moreover, that he believed God to be the all-pervading essence and order of the universe; man to be fitted for his state, each individually answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another,

and that faith in the highest exemplar of humanity as he conceived it, that had ever appeared on earth, added to a good life and its associate charities, was that which was required for salvation? Shall we, we ask, think of such a man as less pious, less religious, less likely to be acceptable to God than one who believed that there was a certain Word which was with God from the beginning, and was indeed God, and yet another. than God; or that God, beside his proper all-sufficing substance, was supplemented by several hypostases or offsets, which were at once himself, yet other than himself; that from eternity God had elected and fore-ordained a relatively limited proportion of mankind to salvation and eternal life, and doomed an infinitely larger proportion to perdition and everlasting death? Shall we, we say further, think that the man who was tolerant of the speculative opinions of others, and whose business in life it was to visit the sick and reach the healing potion, was less of a good, and a true, and a useful member of society, than he who aspired through the unseen, the unknown and the unknowable, to rule the world with a rod of iron, who was utterly intolerant of other speculative opinions than his own, and in enforcing his arbitrary rules for the regulation of life and conversation, was merciless in the use of the Scourge, the branding iron, the sword, and the slow fire? Surely we shall not. Were greatness associated in the world with true nobility of nature, light-bringers, like Michael Servetus, would assuredly be set on a higher evel than conquerors of kingdoms.

CHAPTER XII.

THE TRIAL IS CONTINUED, AND SERVETUS ADDRESSES LETTERS TO CALVIN AND HIS JUDGES.

On returning to his dungeon after his examination on September 15, Servetus addressed his prosecutor in the following characteristic epistle, which the reply to Art. XXI. appears to have suggested:

To John Calvin, health!-It is for your good that I tell you you are ignorant of the principles of things. Would you now be better informed, I say the great principle is this: All action takes place by contact. Neither Christ nor God himself acts upon anything which he does not touch. God would not in truth be God were there anything that escaped his contact. All the qualities of which you dream are imaginations only, slaves of the fields as it were. But there is no virtue of God, no grace of God, nor anything of the sort in God which is not God himself; neither does God put quality into aught in which he himself is not. All is from him, by him, and in him. When the Holy Spirit acts in us, therefore it is God that is in us—that is in contact with us, that actuates us. In the course of our discussion I detect you in another To maintain the force of the old law, you quote Christ's words where he asks: What says the law?' and answers himself by saying: 'Keep the commandments.' But here you have to think of the law not yet accomplished, not

error.

yet abrogated; to think further, that Christ, when he willed to interpose in human things, willed to abide by the law; and that he to whom he spoke was living under the law. Christ, therefore, properly referred at this time to the law as to a master. But afterwards, all things being accomplished, the newer ages were emancipated from the older. For the same reason it was that he ordered another to show himself to the priest and make an offering. Shall we, therefore, do the like? He also ordered a lamb and unleavened bread to be prepared for the Passover: Shall we, too, make ready in this fashion? Why do you go on Judaising in these days with your unleavened bread? Ponder these things well, I beseech you, and carefully read over again my twenty-third letter. Farewell.1

How little likely this epistle, however reasonable in itself, was calculated to win the favour of Calvin, need not be said. To pretend to set John Calvin right in anything could, indeed, only be taken by him as an impertinence.

In the present disposition towards the prisoner— the purely metaphysical and undemonstrable nature of the matters in debate, taken into account-we may reasonably conclude that the Judges had hoped he would be able to explain away the offensive and heretical sense in which his views were regarded by the head of their Church-and indeed, and in so far as they could be understood, as they must have been seen by themselves.

But Servetus, unhappily for himself, did not improve

1 From Mosheim's Neue Nachrichten, Beilagen, S. 102, copied from the archives of the Church of Zürich.