see Vaticanus asserting the courage and consistency of the victim which had been unjustly called in question by Calvin.

Coming to the burden of the book we find as many as 150 passages from Calvin's Defensio orthodoxa fidei' commented and controverted, and in addition, four from the reply of Zürich to the Council of Geneva.

6

By much the most complete and able of the works against Calvin and those who would have heretics punished by being put to death, is that of Minus Celsus of Sienna. A fugitive from his native country to escape arrest and punishment for having forsaken Popery, Minus Celsus found safety at length after passing through many perils in Switzerland. Escaped from the hands of Antichrist, as he says, and safe amid the Rhetian Alps,' he was not a little scandalised to find nothing of the unity of doctrine among the Reformed Churches he had been led to expect before leaving his native country. They held together as one, indeed, in hate of the Pope, calling him Antichrist and looking on the Mass as idolatry, but they differed on innumerable other points among themselves, and not only persecuted but went the length of putting each other to death, and this in no such primitive way as by stoning, in old Hebrew fashion, but by roasting the living man with a slow fire, vivum lento igne torrendo-punishment more horrible than Scythian or Cannibal ever contrived.'

1 Mini Celsi Senensis de Hæreticis capitali supplicio afficientibus; adjuncta sunt Theod. Beza ejusdem argumenti et And. Duditii Epistolæ duæ contraria. 8vo. s. L. 1584.

Celsus had heard of the execution of Servetus at Geneva, and been assured by some who were present, persons worthy of all trust, that the constancy of the sufferer was such that many of the spectators, finding it impossible to imagine anything of the kind endured without the immediate support of God, instead of feeling horror for a blasphemer rightfully put to death, were led to look on him as a martyr to the cause of truth, and so made shipwreck of the faith in which they had hitherto lived.

This led Celsus to think of the treatise he had formerly written in his native language on the proper way of dealing with heresy, and turning it into Latin he resolved to have it printed. He did not live, however, to carry out his purpose; his book was only published some years after his death by a friend who gives no more than the initials of his name, J. F. D., but adds M.D., whereby we learn that he was a physician.

'No man,' says Mosheim,' 'can write more amiably or controvert more gently than this Minus Celsus. He never uses a word that is either bitter or insulting. His principal opponents are Calvin and Beza, of course, but he does not name them specially when he controverts their conclusions, although he proclaims his horror of all violence in matters of faith. He does, indeed, speak of Calvin once by name, but it is with mingled commendation and sorrow that 'one who had deserved so well of the Church on many counts, and who thought

in earlier years that religion was not to be furthered by severity or violence, should have finally fallen away from his better persuasion. Why he changed, I know not God knows.' Calvin did not live to see this excellent work of the Siennese Celsus. Although written in his lifetime, the great Reformer died twenty years before it saw the light. How it would have affected him we can only say with our pious Celsus, God knows!

CHAPTER XXII.

CALVIN'S BIOGRAPHERS AND APOLOGISTS.

AMONG writers nearer our own time there are few who openly and unreservedly uphold Calvin in his conduct to Servetus, none who now advocate persecution unto death for divergence in religious opinion. Even they who hold the memory of Calvin in the highest honour are driven, as we have seen, to find excuses for him in his pursuit of the indiscreet but pious Spaniard. We in these days do, indeed, believe that they who should approve his deed would sin even as he did. Paul Henry, the author of one of the latest lives we have of Calvin, and his measureless partisan and apologist, even with the moderate acquaintance he has with Servetus' works, feels himself forced at times to pause in the unmitigated condemnation of their author he is disposed to indulge in. Like Farel, in contact with the victim, telling the people that 'after all the man perhaps meant well;' Henry says, that 'from the executed man, der Gerichtete, we hear certain echoes of Christianity which sadden as they flow not from the true faith. But his pyre still gleams portentous to the world, and even when it burned it was a herald of the

dawn of better days to come.

Servetus, in his steadfast

protestation even unto death, became a true Reformer. His fate has for ever impressed the Protestant (Henry has the Evangelical) Church with hate of the besetting sin of the Church of Rome, the crime of dealing with religious error by inflicting death. It has even familiarised the world with the thought that there is a still higher development of the religious principle in man than has yet found expression in either the Roman or Reformed Churches, awaiting a coming time.'

This surely is noble writing. Nor does the apologist pause here, but goes on to speak of him who to Calvin and his age was a blasphemer of God, as being really and in truth 'a pious man.' 'Were an assembly of Deputies from every Christian Church now to meet on Champel,' says Henry, 'to take into consideration all that is extant on the life and fate of Servetus, and to review the facts in the light of the times to which they refer, they would speak Calvin free from reproach and pronounce him not guilty; of Servetus, on the other hand, they would say, guilty, but with extenuating circumstances.' We venture to believe, and trust we have shown cause sufficient to warrant our conclusion, that the sentence would be precisely the reverse. Calvin would be found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances; Servetus not guilty in all but the use of intemperate and sometimes improper language.

Henry, to his honour, goes yet farther; he does not approve of Calvin's attempt to detract from the horror

M M