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SERVETUS AND CALVIN

By the same Author.

BENEDICT D’ESPINOZA; his Life, Correspondence, and Ethics.

G. E. LESSING’S NATHAN THE WISE. With an Introduction.

THE SUDORIPAROUS AND LYMPHATIC GLANDULAR SYSTEMS; the Vital Nature of their Functions, and the Effect of Implications of these on the Diseases ascribed to Malaria.

MICHEL SERVETUS

SERVETUS AND CALVIN
A STUDY OF AN IMPORTANT EPOCH
IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF
THE REFORMATION
BY
R. WILLIS, M.D.

Περὶ τῆς τριάδος—scis me semper veritum fore. Bone Deus, quales tragœdias excitabit ad posteros hæc questio: εἰ ἐστὶν ὑπόστασις ὁ λόγος; εἰ ἐστὶν ὑπόστασις τὸ πνεῦμα?

Melanchthon

HENRY S. KING & CO., LONDON
1877

Universal history is at bottom the history of the great men who have lived and worked here. And truly the inexhaustible, the perennial Epic is the story of man’s life from age to age.

Thomas Carlyle

(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.)

TO
HIS FRIENDS
SAMUEL DAVIDSON, D.D.
AND
R. W. MACKAY, M.A.
This Work is Dedicated
WITH EVERY EXPRESSION OF AFFECTIONATE REGARD
AND ESTEEM
BY THE WRITER

PREFACE.

Some years ago I was led to make a study of the Life and Writings of Spinoza, and took considerable pains to present the gifted Jew of Amsterdam in such fulness to the English reader as might suffice to convey a passable idea of what one of the great misunderstood and misused among the sons of men was in himself, in his influence on his more immediate friends and surroundings through his presence, and on the world for all time through all his works. This study completed, and leisure from the more active duties of professional life enlarging with increasing years, I bethought me of some other among the sufferers in the holy cause of human progress as means of occupation and improvement. Spinoza led, I might say as matter of course, to Giordano Bruno, with whose writings I was familiar, and who was Spinoza’s master, if he ever had a master. But having, at a former period, undertaken to edit the works of Harvey for the Sydenham Society, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood having become renewed matter of discussion with medical men and others, labourers in the field of general literature, I was turned from Bruno to Servetus, as the first who proclaimed the true way in which the blood from the right reaches the left chambers of the heart by passing through the lungs, and who even hinted at its further course by the arteries to the body at large.

Of Servetus at this time I knew little or nothing, save that he had been burned as a heretic at Geneva by Calvin; and of his works I had seen no more than the extract in which he describes the pulmonary circulation. But meditating a revision and prospective publication of the Life of Harvey, with which I had prefaced my edition of his works, I went in search of further information concerning the ingenious anatomist who had not only outstripped his contemporaries, but his successors, by something like a century in making so important an induction as the Pulmonary Circulation. Nor had I far to go. In the ample stores of the British Museum Library I found a complete mine of Servetus-literature, and with access to the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ as reproduced by a learned physician, Dr. De Murr, and other works of the unfortunate Servetus, I encountered not only the physiologist already known to me, but the philosopher and scholar, the practical physician, freed from the fetters of mediæval routine, the geographer and astronomer, the biblical critic, in days when criticism of the kind, as we understand the term, was unimagined, and, alas for him! the most advanced and tolerant of the Reformers,—that sacred band to which Servetus by indefeasible right belongs. Luther, Calvin, and the rest repudiated the discipline and most of the outward rites and shows of the Roman Catholic Church; but they retained the most abstruse of her creeds. Servetus went at least as far as they in the rejection of externals; but, appealing to the scriptures of the New Testament, he satisfied himself and dared to say to the world that some of the fundamentals of Christianity as formulated by the Church of Rome, and acquiesced in by the Reformers of Germany, had no warrant in the teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth. Rejecting, as he did, the whole of the post-apostolic dogmatic accretions of the Church of Rome, Servetus is the source of the more ‘reasonable service’ we are now permitted to render, and—strange conjunction!—through his disastrous intercourse with Calvin, in no small measure the original of the free enquiry that is leading on to conclusions yet uncontemplated as to man’s relations to the Unseen and the Eternal.

The life and labours of the man of whom so much may be said can never be otherwise than interesting to the world. Nor is it in his life only that Servetus has been influential. His death has, perhaps, been even more influential than his life; for when his pyre began to blaze, the beacon was lighted that first warned effectually from the shoals of bigotry and intolerance on which religion misunderstood has made shipwreck so long. The custom of consigning heretics, as dissidents in their interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures were called, to death by fire then began to fall into abeyance; princes and chief magistrates ceased from assisting at autos-da-fé as edifying spectacles; and persecution to less terrible conclusions—imprisonment, banishment, fine, and social ostracism—has been coming gradually, however slowly, to an end.

We have more than one book in English purporting to give an account of the life of Servetus, but none, I think, that is not either a compilation at second hand, or a translation wholly or in principal part from the French. No one among us appears to have referred to the works of Servetus and his contemporaries for the information that would have enabled him to give something like a true presentment of the man as he lived and died. To do this—to make the English reader acquainted with another of the great devoted men who have toiled on life’s pilgrimage with bleeding feet, to smooth and make straight the way for others, healers in the strife and in front of the battle, not to strike but to staunch the wounds that men in their ignorance and madness make on one another—such is the purpose of the work now presented to the reader.

In appealing mainly to the original sources of information on the life of Servetus, I have still not failed to make myself master of what has been done in later days by others in this direction. The references that occur in the course of my book to the writings of La Roche, Allwörden, Mosheim, D’Artigny, Trechsel, Rilliet, and, last but not least, of Henry Tollin, make it unnecessary for me to do more in this place than to acknowledge my obligations to them.

One word on the portrait of Servetus. Of the original of this Mosheim gives a particular account; but all Tollin’s enquiries, as well as those I have made myself, lead to the belief that it is no longer in existence. Doubt has even been expressed as to the authenticity of this portrait of which we have indifferent engravings in Hornius’ ‘Kirchengeschichte,’ in Allwörden’s ‘Historia,’ and in Mosheim’s ‘Ketzergeschichte.’ After careful study of these, my daughter has done her best to reproduce in the etching appended what must have been a striking and is certainly a typical Spanish countenance.

The etching of Calvin is after an engraving from one of the numerous more or less authentic portraits of the Reformer that are extant.

Barnes, Surrey: Midsummer 1877.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.
EARLY LIFE—WORKS—ARREST AND TRIAL AT VIENNE

CHAPTER I.
MICHAEL SERVETUS, HIS BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY EDUCATION.

Michael Serveto, or as we know him best by his name with the Latin termination, Servetus, appears, from the most trustworthy information we possess, to have been born either at Tudela, in the old Spanish kingdom of Navarre, or at Villaneuva, in that of Aragon; but whether here or there, and in the year 1509 or 1511, is an open question. In the course of the Trial he stood at Vienne in Dauphiny, in the spring of 1553, he says himself that he is a native of Tudela, and forty-two years of age; which would make Navarre the country, and 1511 the year, of his birth. But in the Geneva Trial, only four months later, he declares that he is of Villanova, and forty-four years old; which would give us Aragon as the land, and 1509 as the date, of his nativity. When he spoke of himself as a Navarrese at Vienne, it may have been done to conciliate his French judges, Navarre having once been a province of France, and the natives of the two countries having still much in common. It was at a moment, too, when he had paramount motives for seeking to conceal his identity. When he said at Geneva that he was ‘Espagnol Arragonois de Villeneuve’ and forty-four, he was face to face with one who knew him well, and when he had neither motive nor opportunity for concealment. Servetus’s subscription of himself as ‘Michael Serveto, alias Revés, de Aragonia, Hispanus,’ on the title-page of his first work; as ‘Michael Villanovanus,’ on the titles of all the books he edited, and the name ‘Villeneuve’ by which alone he was known through the whole of the years he lived in France, to say nothing of the ‘M. S. V.,’ evidently Michael Servetus Villanovanus, on the last leaf of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ the printing of which led to his death, supply, as it seems, preponderating evidence as to the place of his birth, though the year may still be left uncertain. The alias Revés which appears on the title of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ the first-fruits of his genius, has hitherto been a puzzle and subject of debate with his biographers, but can now be satisfactorily interpreted. Servetus’s mother, it appears, was of French extraction, of the Revés family, and her son took occasion in his first work piously to preserve his mother’s family name beside his proper patronymic.[1] Of the parents of Servetus, however, we in fact know little more than that we have from himself when, on his trial at Geneva, he informed the Court that they were d’ancienne race, vivants noblement, of old families and independent, or in easy circumstances, and that his father was a Notary by profession. Report adds that he was of a family which had been jurists for generations, and that his father was nearly related to Andrea Serveto d’Aninon, some time Professor of Civil Law in the University of Bologna, subsequently member of the Cortes of Aragon, and one of the Council of the Indies. So much makes it clear that Michael Servetus was of gentle blood, of Christian parentage, and neither of Jewish nor Moorish descent, as has been said on no better ground apparently than that he shows he was acquainted with Hebrew, had read the Koran, and in his writings is not intolerant towards Jews and Mahomedans, like his countrymen.

Neither have we any very precise information as regards Servetus’s earlier years and education. Of somewhat slender build, and so of presumably delicate constitution, though he showed no trace of this in after life, he is said to have been destined by his parents to the service of the Church; in which view, whilst yet a youth, he was placed for nurture in one of the convents of his native town or its neighbourhood. And this we should imagine must almost necessarily be true; for the rudiments of the liberal education Servetus shows himself to have received, could only have been obtained in the early part of the sixteenth century in the quiet of the cloister, and under the fostering care of some monk more learned than the general.

The precocious ability and pious temperament with which we must credit Servetus may have been a further motive for the line of life chalked out for him by his parents. The Church was then, as it still continues to be, the close through which an easy and a pious life can be best secured where there is neither talent nor aspiration; as it is also the highway to worldly wealth and power, where there is ambition and ability to back what passes for piety. By mental and moral endowment Servetus probably appeared to all about him a born churchman, with the crosier, and even the cardinal’s hat, in perspective. But side by side with so much that pointed in this direction, the reasoning, sceptical, and self-sufficing nature of the man that led the opposite way, as it had not yet appeared, so was it unsuspected. Servetus as a youth unquestionably received the education that would have fitted him for the Priesthood; and we think complacently of the solace and relaxation from the monotony of monastic life, which the worthy brother we evoke as his principal teacher found in imparting all he knew, and pointing out the onward way to one both apt and eager to learn. Before leaving the convent, or the convent school, where he doubtless remained for several years, Servetus must have been not only a tolerable Latin scholar, but, it may have been, also grounded in Greek and the rudiments of Hebrew.

At what age Servetus left his convent teachers we are not informed; some time however, we should imagine, before definitive vows are required of the youthful aspirant to the holy office, when aptitude for the prospective vocation is made subject of particular inquiry. Now it may have been that he was discovered to be indifferently qualified by mental constitution to follow further the line of life intended for him—a conclusion to which we are led from all we know of the man in his works. He was pious enough and credulous enough through life; but his religion must be of the kind he thought out for himself, and his beliefs of his own fashioning, not such as could be presented to him ready shaped for acceptance. The very air of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was alive with mutterings of the storm that had long been gathering, and found vent at length through the manly voice of Martin Luther; and when we find hints that fears of the Inquisition had had something to do with Servetus’s subsequent movements, we are disposed to imagine that the call to free thought which had sprung up on the revival of letters and found out the northern Monk in his cell, had also reached the Friar of the south, and from him flowed over upon the receptive mind of his youthful scholar.

Be this as it may, when twelve or fourteen years of age, Servetus appears to have entered as a student at the University of Saragossa, then the most celebrated in Spain; and if he had Peter Martyr de Angleria among the number of his teachers, as we are assured he had,[2] he was in the hands of one of the most accomplished as well as liberal-minded men of his age. Angleria was in fact still more distinguished as a scholar, diplomatist, teacher and writer, than as a soldier. Having come to Spain in the suite of one of the Italian embassies to Ferdinand and Isabella, he joined the army of the Catholic king and queen as a volunteer, and having distinguished himself on more than one occasion in the field, he was presented to the sovereigns on the conclusion of hostilities, entered the service of Isabella, in especial, and having taken orders—an indispensable condition to acknowledgment as a teacher—he was engaged by the queen as tutor and general supervisor of the education of the host of young noblemen and gentlemen who thronged the Court. The influence exerted by such a man in such a situation cannot be doubted; and it has been surmised that more than one of the distinguished personages who appeared in Spain, in the early part of the sixteenth century, owed not a little of all that made them notable in after life to their teacher. Angleria was in fact a man in advance of his age, morally, and, we must believe, religiously also—although Spain was not always the devoted slave of Rome we have been accustomed to think her in these our days. He had seen enough in his campaigning and its consequences to disgust him with conversions to Christianity at the point of the sword, and the wholesale deportation from their native country of a great civilised community because of their adhesion to the religion of their fathers. An Italian by birth, it was no part of Angleria’s religion to hate Jews and Saracens with such a hatred as made baptizing, banishing, torturing and putting them to death the virtue it appeared in the eyes of the Spaniards.

At Saragossa Servetus may have remained four or five years, working hard at all that qualified him to appear as he meets us in after life—perfecting himself in classics, and introduced not only to the Ethics of Aristotle and the scholastic philosophy, but also to the more positive domains of human knowledge—the mathematics, astronomy and geography—geography more especially, brought into vogue as it was by the great discoveries of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and the hardy navigators and travellers who came after them, then made accessible to the general reader by the works of Angleria, Grynæus and others.

Having broken definitively with the idea of the Church as a calling, Servetus must now have made up his mind to follow what might fairly be spoken of as the hereditary vocation of his family—Law; and the School of Toulouse being at this time the most celebrated in Europe, to Toulouse he was sent as a student of Law by his father. Here he seems to have remained for two or three years—short while enough in which to fathom the intricacies of civil and canon law, to say nothing of other studies that must have continued to engage some share of his attention; but that the time given to the study of Law at Toulouse was not misspent, is proclaimed by the occasional scraps of legal lore we notice interspersed in his writings. In the covenant between God and Abraham, to cite one among many instances, he observes that we have the first case on record of one of the four forms of unindentured contract, still spoken of as the form Facio ut facias. Elsewhere also, and at other times, on his trial at Geneva in particular, he is credited by his prosecutor with an adequate knowledge of the Pandects, although he says himself that he had never done more than read Justinian in the perfunctory manner usual with young men at college. On the occasion referred to, nevertheless, we find him quoting the decisions of jurisconsults in support of his conclusions.

But Law, we believe, was never the subject that engrossed the thoughts of Servetus. The natural bent of his mind, and the teaching he had received during his earlier years, led him to Theology; and it was at Toulouse, as he tells us himself, that he first made acquaintance with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is not difficult to imagine the effect which the perusal of these writings must have produced on the ardent religious temperament of Servetus. In his earliest work he speaks of the Bible as a book come down from heaven, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science—language, however, that is to be seen as hyperbole to a great extent; for he was already imbued with scholastic philosophy, and, we must presume, with patristic theology also, before he had read a word of the Bible; and in his published works we find him at various times subordinating the teaching of the Scriptures to the conclusions of his reason. Toulouse, indeed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, was an unlikely school for religious study in any but the most rigidly orthodox fashion; and how far Michael Servetus swerved from this—to his sorrow—need not now be more particularly noticed. It was even the boast of the Toulousans for long, that their city had not been infected with what was spoken of as the poison of Lutheranism. So strict a watch had been kept over them by their shepherds, the priests, that, whilst in neighbouring and other more distant cities of France the Reformation had many adherents, it had none—openly, at all events—in Toulouse. It were needless to insist that training of a special kind, in addition to originality and independence of mind, was required to lead to views and conclusions such as those attained to by Servetus.[3]

He had read the Bible, however, at Toulouse; and there, too, if it were not at an earlier period, he must have met with some of the writings of Luther, of which several had been translated into Spanish soon after their publication.[4] But there is another book which enjoyed an extensive reputation through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seems to supply the kind of aliment precisely of which a mind constituted like that of Servetus must have felt the want. This is the ‘Theologia Rationalis sive Liber de Creaturis’ of Raymund de Sabunde, in which the Creator is reached by a gradual ascent from lower to higher grades of created things.

The ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde is indeed a most noteworthy book; full of true piety, resting on the wider and surer grounds of nature at large in harmony with human intelligence, than the dogmatic theologian can show in the written text and unwritten traditions on which he relies for his conclusions. Containing no word that is not thoroughly orthodox, doctrine, nevertheless, is not that which it is the grand object of the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde to propound. Neither is authority paraded, as it would have been had the book been written by a professed theologian, instead of a pious naturalist; for Sabunde was a physician, one of the guild whose destiny it is to lead the van of progress. We cannot believe that the work, though often reprinted, was ever heartily approved by the heads of the Church of Rome. Its title went far to condemn it. The Roman Catholic Church requires faith, submissiveness, subserviency, not reason, of its sons; and we are not, therefore, surprised to find that though the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde, as a whole, long escaped being placed on the index of prohibited books, the prologue with which we find one of the early editions, if it be not the first (Argentorati, 1496), introduced, was soon ordered to be expunged; nor, indeed, as culture extended and the Reformation spread, with ever-increasing alarm to the dominant Church, that the book itself was at length pointedly forbidden to be read by the faithful. It was put upon the ‘Index’ by the Congregation of the Council of Trent in 1595, the author ‘holding too much by Nature,’ say the reverend councillors, ‘to give us a knowledge of God and his providential dealing with the world, and making too little reference to the Fathers and the authority of Holy Writ.’

The Prologue of Sabunde is in truth a very remarkable piece of writing, the age considered in which it flowed from the pen. Beginning in the accredited orthodox fashion: ‘Ad laudem et gloriam altissimæ et gloriosissimæ Trinitatis,’ &c., the author proceeds to say that his purpose is ‘to expose the errors, as well of the ancient philosophers as of pagan and infidel writers, by the science he has to propound; to set forth the catholic faith in its infallible truthfulness, and to show every sect opposed thereunto in its necessary falsity and erroneousness. Two books,’ he continues, ‘are given to us by God for our guidance: one, the universal book of created things, or the book of Nature; the other, the book of the sacred Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning, when the world was made; the second is to supplement and solve the difficulties met with in the first. The book of the Creatures lies open to all; but the book of the Scriptures can only be read aright by the clergy. The book of Nature cannot be falsified, neither can it be readily interpreted amiss, even by heretics; but the book of the Scriptures they can misconstrue and falsify at their pleasure.’ The author’s design, therefore, is to write a book which gentle and simple alike may read and understand without a master; and he ends his prologue with a compliment and submission to Holy Mother Church, which her hierarchs, however, have not accepted either gratefully or graciously; for they did not of old, any more than they do now, want books that would enable readers to go their own way without the guiding hand of a master. Shall we wonder, therefore, that this notable prologue was looked on at an early date as highly objectionable, and is not to be found in any of the later editions of the book?[5]

Michel de Montaigne has given an interesting account of this ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde. His father thought so highly of it that he set his son, the immortal Essayist, to translate it into French: a task which it were needless to say he performed in a very admirable manner, though the sire did not live to see the work in type and in the hands of the public he was anxious to reach through its means. The book, says Montaigne, is composed by a Spaniard, in indifferent Latin—basti d’un Espagnol, baraguiné des terminaisons Latines—but well adapted to meet a want of the day. The novelties of Luther coming into vogue and shaking old beliefs, Sabunde, as he thinks, ‘gives very good advice against a disease that ever tends towards execrable atheism.’ If Sabunde does give tres bon advis, his ‘Book of the Creatures’ is nevertheless the text from which the most sceptical perhaps of the whole series of the ‘Essays’ is written; and if the ‘Theologia Rationalis’ fell into the hands of the youthful Michael Servetus, as we believe it must almost necessarily have done, we have no difficulty in imagining that it influenced him in a still greater degree, and not much otherwise than it did young Michel de Montaigne. A rational exposition of God’s revelation of himself in nature, we apprehend, must have been a craving in the soul of the serious Spaniard still more than in that of the lively Gascon.[6]

But there is another writer whose influence on his age and the progress of free thought it is impossible to estimate too highly, and from whose teaching Servetus on his death-walk owned that he had had something. This is Erasmus. What Servetus had he does not say. Whatever it may have been, it was unaccompanied by the caution and cold discretion that distinguished the great scholar of Rotterdam. In the Scholia which Erasmus added to his Greek New Testament, however, we fancy we see heralds of the far bolder and more original exegetical annotations with which Servetus, under his assumed name of Villanovanus, accompanied his reprint of the Pagnini Bible, which we shall have to speak of by and by.

In addition to all he learned from his convent teachers, from the professors of Saragossa and Toulouse, from Sabunde, Luther, Erasmus, and others on the subject of theology, Servetus must further have been well read in general history and the works of travellers in foreign lands, as we shall find when we come to study his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, and refer particularly to his biblical criticisms, in days when criticism of the kind he brought to bear on the text of the Scriptures was unknown. It was only in the early part of the sixteenth century that the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament began to be appealed to by the learned, and made the subject of critical study in a way never thought of before. Long limited to the letter, the study was widened in its scope by Servetus, and, embracing general history, made to include a new and highly important element in its bearing on the Religious Idea. If Servetus of himself arrived at the interpretation he gives of the Psalms and Prophetical writings of Israel, he must indeed have been possessed of no ordinary share of natural sagacity informed by study, and of moral courage in addition; for it runs counter to all that had been assumed from the date of the New Testament writings almost to the present day. The free use he makes of his historical reading in its application to David, Cyrus, and Hezekiah, may have been that which led some of his biographers to imagine that he was of Jewish descent, and to say that he had visited Africa, and had had Mahomedan as well as Jewish teachers, from whom he imbibed his notions, hostile to the common orthodox interpretation of the Prophets, and the conception of a Triune God.

It were absurd to suppose that Servetus’s early convent education and subsequent studies at Saragossa and Toulouse had made him all he shows himself to be in his works. He continued a student through the whole of his life, and it is indeed among the privileges of the physician that his education never ends; but it was certainly at an early period of his career that he became possessed of the theological ideas which he went on elaborating, even to the day when his ‘Restoration of Christianity’ was in type and ready for the publication it did not obtain. It is therefore of moment with us to seize and follow up every incident in his life that induced or strengthened the bent of his mind towards theological speculation; and the event which now befel, we must presume, had no slight influence in this direction.

CHAPTER II.
SERVICE WITH FRIAR JUAN QUINTANA, CONFESSOR OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.

School and college days come naturally to an end, or are cut short by one intervening incident or another; and the studies of Michael Servetus at Toulouse were interrupted by an invitation to enter his service from brother Juan Quintana, a Franciscan friar, confessor to the Emperor Charles V., about to attend on his Sovereign to his coronation in the imperial city of Bologna, and, of still greater significance, to the Diet of Augsburg, which followed it closely. In what capacity Servetus joined Quintana we are not informed; but if father confessors ever engaged private secretaries, we can hardly doubt that it must have been in the intimate relationship suggested, for which the accomplishments of the younger man so obviously qualified him. The invitation from Quintana is interesting on many accounts, and was certainly an important element in the mental development of Servetus. Though he may have quitted Spain hurriedly, perhaps secretly—in fear of the Inquisition, as said—he could have left nothing but a good name for conduct and accomplishment behind him, otherwise he would never have been recommended as a fit and proper person to act as secretary to the confessor of the great Emperor. Not forgotten by his old masters of Saragossa, the clever student was thought of by them when Quintana made known his want of a secretary, and must have been recommended to him as in every way qualified to fill a situation of the kind.

Michael Servetus, as we apprehend him, was one of those sensitive natures which, like the stainless plate of the photographer, retains at once and reflects every object presented to it; his service with Quintana, consequently, was one of the incidents that influenced the whole of his after life. Up to the time of his engagement with the confessor he had been but one among hundreds of other students, known to his teachers as a young man of superior abilities, it may be, but not an object of more particular attention to any one of them. In the intimate relationship implied between the elderly principal and the youthful underling matters were entirely changed; and recent inquiries[7] lead to the conclusion that the hood of the barefooted friar Juan Quintana covered the head of a man of superior powers, cherishing larger, more liberal and more tolerant views than were current in his age, more especially among the class to which he belonged.

Quintana appears to have attracted the notice of the Emperor so far back as the date of the Diet of Worms, during the sittings of which he had distinguished himself as a preacher and become generally known as a theologian and man of learning. He had at the same time, however, and in like measure, fallen out of favour with his party, opposed at every point to the reform movement, in consequence of the moderation of his views. Matters at Worms had gone in no wise to the satisfaction of the Emperor, owing in no inconsiderable degree, as he must have believed, to the intolerance and mismanagement of his clerical advisers. To give the approaching Diet of Augsburg, of which Charles was thinking far more seriously than of the pageant of Bologna when he made Quintana his confessor, a chance of proving the bond of union he desired between the two great religious parties which now divided his empire, he saw that he must rid himself of the narrow-minded and utterly irreconcilable Dominican Loaysa, whom he had had at Worms as his spiritual director. From Loaysa he knew he had no prospect of receiving those counsels of concession and compromise which, as a politician, he saw were indispensable and to which he was himself at the moment by no means disinclined. He must have another confessor of more liberal views, not utterly opposed to the reformation of the Church in all its aspects and to the whole body of the Reformers with whom, as heretics, it was condescension on the part of a Roman Catholic dignitary to communicate, and contamination, if it were not sin, to sympathise. The old director had therefore to be got rid of, for a time at least; but he must suffer no slight, be subjected to no show of mistrust, to no seeming loss of confidence; he must not even be superseded in his office, but only removed to a distance and so made innocuous. Charles therefore discovered that a representative, who must be presumed to be familiar with the most secret aspirations of his soul, would be required at Rome as the medium of communication between himself and his holiness the Pope, in connection with the important business in prospect at Augsburg. Loaysa, accordingly—greatly to his disgust beyond question—was dispatched with all the honours to Rome, whilst Juan Quintana, summoned from the quiet of the cloister to the bustle of the Court, found himself unexpectedly with a royal and imperial penitent at his ear in the confessional, and an upper seat in the council chamber pending the discussion of affairs of state.

How should we imagine that an invitation to take service with a man possessed of qualities that brought him into such relationships could have been otherwise than instantly embraced by the youthful student of Toulouse; or how doubt that intimate contact with so great a nature as Quintana’s could fail to impress him deeply? Attached forthwith to the service of the confessor and in the suite of the Emperor, not the least observant among all who accompanied him of the pomp and pageantry displayed at the coronation at Bologna, the open-eyed secretary was witness of much besides that sank into his mind, gave matter for future thought, and found free but needlessly offensive expression in his writings. Here, at Bologna, it was in fact, and not at Rome as has been said, that Servetus saw the Pope ‘borne aloft above the heads of the people, the multitude kneeling in the dust, adoring him, and they among them who could but kiss his slipper accounting themselves blessed.’ Nor was it the ignorant multitude alone that showed such abject servility. He saw in addition ‘the most powerful prince of his age, at the head of twenty thousand veteran soldiers, kneeling and kissing the feet of the Pope;’[8] an exhibition which appears to have been thought of as simply degrading instead of edifying by the independent-minded secretary.

So great an event as the coronation of the Emperor was too favourable an occasion to be neglected for a stroke of business by the financiers of the Romish Church: indulgences were in the market in plenty, and at prices to suit all purchasers, immunity from the pains of purgatory being to be obtained for terms in the ratio of the money paid. How shall we imagine that so glaring an abuse could fail to touch Servetus, in the state of mind to which he must already have attained, in the same way as the proceedings of Tetzel and his coadjutors touched the common sense and conscience of Luther? It was doubtless with all he now observed before him that we, short while after, find him speaking in such virulent terms of the Papacy and exclaiming: ‘O bestia bestiarum, meretrix sceleratissima’—‘O beast most beastly, most wicked of harlots!’[9] Some of Luther’s epithets, we might conclude, had found their way into the vocabulary of Servetus; and it may be that the violence of Luther’s invective, unchallenged by the rest of the Reformers, led him to fancy that he too might indulge without impropriety in language of an unseemly kind.

When we think of the times in which Servetus lived, his early education and subsequent surroundings, the violent hatred he seems already to have conceived against the Papacy is not a little extraordinary. We might be tempted to conclude that the free thought of Europe, of which the Reformation was the outcome and expression, had found even a more genial soil in the mind of this Spanish youth than in that of Luther himself, or any of his accredited followers. They went little way in freeing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth from the accretions which metaphysical subtlety, superstition, and ignorance of the laws of nature and the principles of things had gathered around it in the course of ages. Their business, as they apprehended it, was to reform the Church rather than the religion of which it was presumed to be the exponent; the task that Servetus set himself in the end was to reform religion, with little thought of a Church in any sense in which an institution of the kind was conceived in his day, whether by Papist or Protestant.

From reading the Bible at Toulouse and contrasting the humble life and simple theistic morality of the Prophet of Nazareth with the metaphysical subtleties and dogmatic deductions of the schoolmen, the pomp, the power, the tyranny and the greed of the priests so conspicuously displayed at Bologna, we can readily imagine the impression made on the independent spirit of Servetus—an impression that found more seemly utterance anon than that we have already quoted, and in words like these: ‘For my own part I neither agree nor disagree in every particular with either Catholic or Reformer. Both of them seem to me to have something of truth and something of error in their views; and whilst each sees the other’s shortcomings, neither sees his own. God in his goodness give us all to understand our errors and incline us to put them away. It would be easy enough, indeed, to judge dispassionately of everything, were we but suffered without molestation by the Churches freely to speak our minds; the older exponents of doctrine, in obedience to the recommendation of St. Paul, giving place to younger men, and these in their turn making way for teachers of the day who had aught to impart that had been revealed to them. But our doctors now contend for nothing but power. The Lord confound all tyrants of the Church! Amen.’—The voice of this nineteenth century verging on its close, from the mouth of a man little more than of age, living in the first half of the sixteenth![10]

The business of the coronation at Bologna concluded, the Emperor betook himself to Germany in view of the great Diet of Augsburg, formally inaugurated in the summer of 1530, accompanied of course by his confessor, as the confessor was attended by his youthful secretary. And here it must have been that Servetus saw and may perchance have spoken with Melanchthon and others of the leading Reformers, among the number of whom, however, the greatest of them all did not appear. Luther’s friends believed that the danger he must run by showing himself at Augsburg was too great to be incurred. The brave man would himself have faced the peril, but his princely protectors positively forbade the exposure. They feared that at Augsburg the Emperor might be tempted to violate the ‘safe conduct’ he had been reproached by his Papal advisers with having so honourably observed at Worms; for there were still some among the Roman Catholics, high in place, so ill-informed, so blind to events, as to believe that were the head of the man who had inaugurated the movement which compromised their power but off his shoulders, the Reformation would collapse and die! Luther was therefore permitted by his friends to approach the scene of action on this occasion no nearer than Coburg.

Neither at Augsburg any more than at Worms did matters proceed so entirely to the satisfaction of the Emperor as he wished, and may have anticipated. The Protestant princes, with little cohesion among themselves, showed, nevertheless, that severally they were more resolute than ever in their requirements touching religion, less obsequious too to the advances of their suzerain than he found agreeable. They felt themselves in fact, and in so far, masters of the situation, and had mostly quitted Augsburg before the sittings of the Diet came to a close, content to leave Melanchthon and his colleagues to give final shape to the business for which the Diet had been mainly convoked, and in the great Religious Charter of the Age—the Confession of Augsburg—to establish Protestantism as an integral and recognised element, not only in the religious, but in the political system of Europe.

During his attendance on his chief at Augsburg, Servetus, though he saw and may have spoken with more than one of the distinguished Reformers, could have been an object of particular attention to none of them: his youth and subordinate position precluded the possibility of this. That he may have been disappointed at not seeing the original of the great movement which had brought together the august assembly he looked on around him, we may well believe, but we find no evidence in contemporary documents that would lead us to think he had ever come into contact with Luther, as has been said.[11]

CHAPTER III.
THE SERVICE WITH QUINTANA COMES TO AN END.

It is greatly to be regretted that we have nothing from Servetus on the other impressions he received, during the term of his service with Quintana, beside those connected with the pomp and power of the Papacy. We do not even know precisely how long he continued with the confessor of the Emperor, nor where, nor at what moment he left him. Neither have we a word of his whereabouts and mode of life, after vacating his office, until we meet him seeking an interview with Jehan Hausschein, the individual, with his name turned into Greek, so familiar to the world as Œcolampadius. From Servetus himself we have it that he quitted the service of Quintana on his death, which, he says, occurred in Germany. But the truth of this statement has been called in question on very sufficient grounds, Quintana having been seen alive in the flesh, and still in attendance on the Emperor, years after dates at which we know positively that Servetus had been in Basle and Strasburg, communicating with Œcolampadius, Bucer, and others of the Reformers. More than this, he had come before the world as author of the book entitled ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ a copy of which having been found by Joannes Cochlæus, an ecclesiastic in the suite of the Emperor, in a bookseller’s shop at Ratisbon, was by him shown to Quintana, who, we are informed, expressed extreme disgust that a countryman of his own and personally known to him—quem de facie se nôsse dicebat—should have fallen so far into the slough of heresy as to write on the mystery of the Trinity in the style of Michael Servetus, alias Revés.[12] Nor indeed is this the last we hear of Quintana. After the settlement of affairs at Ratisbon and Nürnberg, he attended the Emperor to Italy, and thence to his native Spain, where we find him installed as Prior of the Church of Monte Aragon and a member of the Cortes of the kingdom. Quintana appears in fact to have lived for yet two years, actively engaged in his duties, having only been gathered to his fathers towards the end of the year 1534.[13]

Servetus did not therefore leave the service of Quintana after, or in consequence of, the death of the confessor. We find it difficult indeed to think of one with the decidedly unorthodox opinions to which Servetus had attained at an early period of his life, continuing on terms of intimacy with a man of Quintana’s capacity, without showing something of the leaven of unbelief that must have been already fermenting in his mind. There is, it is true, commonly enough, so much more of policy than of piety among hierarchs of the Church of Rome, and indeed of any church largely possessed of wealth and culture, that their real opinions and beliefs have often been made subject of debate. But Quintana was a monk, although a liberal one, and he was Charles V.’s confessor. Of the Emperor’s orthodoxy, bigotry, and hatred of heresy, however, there can be no question; so that, though policy moved him for a time to entertain as his spiritual adviser a man more tolerant than the general, the occasion for this ceasing, Charles was not likely to find himself altogether at his ease with one at his elbow much more liberally disposed than himself. Quintana consequently on the return to Spain, being absolved of his office of confessor, but handsomely provided for in the Church, Charles recalled Loaysa, his former director in matters of faith, from Rome, and lapsed into the groove of intolerance from which considerations of state had for a moment withdrawn him.

From the false account Servetus gives of the cause of his quitting Quintana, we therefore think it probable that soon after the settlement of matters at Augsburg in the early autumn of 1530, he had incautiously betrayed the state of his mind on some point of the religious question, and been dismissed from his service by the confessor. Service of any sort, indeed, from the estimate we are led to form of the mental constitution of Michael Servetus, could only have been a bondage never patiently to be endured, but to be shaken off at the earliest possible opportunity. His was not a nature that could brook a master; and we have the assurance of Œcolampadius that Michael Servetus was in Basle and making himself obnoxious by his theological fancies previous to the month of October 1530. The coronation at Bologna having taken place in the autumn of 1529, and the Diet of Augsburg assembled at midsummer 1530, Servetus could not, thus, have been in the following of Quintana for more than a year, or eighteen months—no long term if reckoned by the lapse of time, but certainly covering a vast area in the sphere of his mental development. He may have had little leisure for the study of books, but he had his eyes open to the doings of men; and his inner senses were awakened to truths, his reason to conclusions, that influenced him through the rest of his life, and possibly had no insignificant part in bringing him to his untimely end.

CHAPTER IV.
INTERCOURSE WITH THE SWISS REFORMERS.

It would appear that Œcolampadius, Bucer, Bullinger, Zwingli and others, their friends, had had a sort of ‘clerical meeting’ for talking over the theological questions of the day at Basle in the autumn of 1530. On this occasion Œcolampadius informed his friends that he had been troubled of late by a hot-headed Spaniard, Servetus by name, overflowing with Arian heresies and other objectionable opinions, maintaining particularly that Christ was not really and truly the Eternal Son of God; but if not, then was he not, and could not be, the Saviour—were Christus nit rächter, warer, ewiger Gott, so were er doch und könte nit seyn unser Heiland. Waxing warm in his tale, and fearing that such poison, as he conceived it, would not be poured into his ears alone, but would reach those of others, he was minded that measures should be taken against such a contingency. To this Zwingli, addressing him as brother Œcolampady, replied, that ‘there did seem good ground for them to be on their guard; for the false and wicked doctrine of the troublesome Spaniard goes far to do away with the whole of our Christian religion.’ ‘God preserve us,’ said he, ‘from the coming in among us of any such wickedness. Do what you can, then, to quit the man of his errors, and with good and wholesome argument win him to the truth.’ ‘That have I already done,’ said Œcolampady; ‘but so haughty, daring and contentious is he, that all I say goes for nothing against him.’ ‘This is indeed a thing insufferable in the Church of God,’ said Zwingli—Ein unleydenliche Sach in der Kyrchen Gottes. Therefore do everything possible that such dreadful blasphemy get no further wind to the detriment of Christianity.’[14]

Besides the personal communication with Œcolampadius of which we have this interesting notice, Servetus must have written him several letters—unfortunately lost to us—about the same time, for we have two from the Reformer to the Spaniard, which have happily been preserved. In one of these (probably the second that was written), Servetus having, as it seems, complained that he had been somewhat sharply handled by his correspondent, Œcolampadius replies that he, for his part, thinks that he himself has the greater reason to complain. ‘You obtrude yourself on me,’ he says, ‘as if I had nothing else ado than to answer you; asking me questions about all the foolish things the Sorbonne has said of the Trinity, and even taking it amiss that I do not criticise and in your way oppose myself to those distinguished theologians, Athanasius and Nazianzenus. You contend that the Church has been displaced from its true foundation of faith in Christ, and feign that we speak of his filiation in a sense which detracts from the honour that is due to him as the Son of God. But it is you who speak blasphemously; for I now understand the diabolical subterfuges you use. Forbearing enough in other respects, I own that I am not possessed of that extreme amount of patience which would keep me silent when I see Christ dishonoured.’ He then goes on to criticise and rebut Servetus’s theological views—his denial of Two natures in the One person of Christ, and his opinion that in the prophetical writings of the Old Testament it is always a prospective or coming Son of God that is indicated. ‘You,’ continues Œcolampadius, ‘do not admit that it was the Son of God who was to come as man; but that it was the man who came that was the Son of God; language which leads to the conclusion that the Son of God existed not eternally before the incarnation.’

To satisfy the Reformer, or seeking to get upon a better footing with him, Servetus appears now to have composed and sent him a Confession of Faith, which has come down to us. On the face of this there was such a semblance of orthodoxy that Œcolampadius found nothing at first to object to in its statements; but having conversed with the writer and heard his explanations, he had come to see it as utterly fallacious, misleading, and inadmissible. He concludes by exhorting his correspondent to ‘confess the Son to be consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, in which case,’ he says, ‘we shall be able to acknowledge you for a Christian.’[15]

CHAPTER V.
THE REFORMERS OF STRASBURG—PUBLICATION OF THE WORK ON TRINITARIAN ERROR.

The letter of Œcolampadius, as we have it, is without date, but must have been written from Basle at the close of 1530, or the beginning of 1531, and so before the book on Trinitarian Error had been published, as we find no mention made of the work. By this time, however, Servetus must have had the treatise ready for press, for it was now that he put it into the hands of Conrad Kœnig or Rous, a publisher, having establishments both at Basle and Strasburg. Kœnig was not a printer himself; but accepting the work for publication he sent it to Jo. Secerius, of Hagenau, in Alsace, a well-known typographer of the day, to be put into type. To Hagenau accordingly went the MS., followed by the author to superintend the printing; intending from thence to proceed to Strasburg, where he was anxious to have interviews with the leading Reformers of that city, Martin Bucer and W. F. Capito, and propound to them, as he had done to the Switzers, the new views of Christian doctrine at which he had arrived.

From what we know already we might conclude that he found little more encouragement from the ministers of Strasburg than he had had from those of Basle. Servetus himself, however, appears to have thought otherwise, and left them with the impression that neither of the Strasburgers was so wholly opposed to his views as Œcolampadius in particular had shown himself at Basle. We find him, by and by, in fact, speaking as if he even believed that in the first instance they were alike disposed to abet rather than condemn his conclusions. And this, from what came out subsequently, seems really to have been the case, in so far, at least, as Capito stands concerned. Capito was, in fact, the most advanced and truly tolerant of all the early Reformers, and if we may rely on the report we have of his opinions from the author of the ‘Antitrinitarian Library,’[16] he was really not behind Servetus in his rejection of the orthodox tripartite Deity. A kindly sympathy with a young enthusiast, full of fancies on topics really beyond the reach of demonstration, may have induced Bucer as well as his colleague, Capito, to feel a certain interest in the subject of our study, and so led them both to treat him otherwise than as the irreverent dreamer he had appeared to Œcolampadius; to see him, in a word, as he was in truth—a well-read and piously disposed, albeit in their opinion a more or less mistaken, scholar.

Servetus undoubtedly possessed the character of the enthusiast in perfection, and by natural constitution was not only indisposed, but to a certain extent incapable of seeing a question in any light save that in which he set it himself. Bucer, although he became hostile to Servetus in the end, must in fact have been not a little taken with him on their earlier intercourse, when in a letter to a friend he speaks of him as ‘his dear son’—‘filius meus dilectus.’ When not curtly met as the rash innovator and heretic, Servetus was neither the proud nor the impracticable man he appeared to Œcolampadius and Calvin. During his visit to Strasburg, when he was doubtless busy with his ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’—revising, polishing, and seeing it through the press—in a notable modification of the terms in which one of the cardinal points of his doctrine is spoken of in an earlier and in a later passage of the work, Bucer’s kindly counsel, it is presumed, may be detected. Whilst in Book IV. we find these words, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; the Word was the shadow only, Christ was the substance,’ in Book VII. he says, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; but to Christ himself there is ascribed a kind of eternity of engenderment. The things that were under the Law were shadows of the body of Christ.’[17]

Whatever the two distinguished Reformers of Strasburg may have said, however—and we can hardly doubt of their having tried to win him to the views that were commonly entertained—he was not stayed for a moment in his purpose of getting into print. Nay—and we know not why the right should be refused him—he seems to have thought himself at as full liberty as the leaders of the great movement then afoot to give his own interpretation of the kind of reform which not the Church only, but its doctrine, required. For such an undertaking he was as well qualified by culture as any of the Reformers—better qualified, in fact, than many among them, as in genius we believe he was surpassed, and in liberality and tolerance approached by none. Servetus, in truth, had started in the reforming race unweighted, and so, and in so far with a better chance of reaching the goal of simple truth than either Luther or Calvin; for though he had received the education of the cloister, he was neither professed monk nor priest; and, without detriment to the piety of his spirit, or his belief in what were held by the world as the oracles of God, he had freed himself from the fetters of necessary assent to the interpretations put upon these, formulated into dogmas, by the Church in which he had been born and bred. Servetus seems never to have had any misgivings about his title to show himself among the number of the Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined; among men who had thought freely, and whom he had been used to hear spoken of by his clerical surroundings, whilst in the suite of Quintana, as heretics and blasphemers. These names he did not fear in such respectable company as he found the Reformers of Switzerland and Germany to be; and though he did not agree with them on some topics, he could bear with them as well in that wherein he differed from them as in that wherein they differed among themselves, and saw no reason why they should not in like manner bear with him. He thought of nothing, therefore, but prospective fame for himself in the publication he contemplated. The names of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest, appeared on the title-pages of their works: why, then, should his name be withheld from the world? On the title-page of the ‘Seven Books on Mistaken Conceptions of the Trinity’ accordingly, which now came forth from the press, we find not only his family name, Servetus, but the alias, Revés, from his mother’s side of the house, and the name of the country that called him son:—

‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.
Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,
Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,
1531.’

The publisher and printer, having an eye to business, not notoriety, and suspicious in all probability of the reception the article in the production of which they were aiding and abetting, might receive, were more cautious than the author; for the name neither of printer, publisher, nor place of publication, appears on the title-page. In the month of July, 1531, however, the book was to be bought at once in the cities of Strasburg, Frankfort, and Basle: but no one knew for more than twenty years where it had been printed, nor who besides the author—who had also vanished out of sight—had been accessory to its publication. The truth only came out in the course of the author’s trial at Geneva in the year 1553. Basle had the credit for a time of having hatched the cockatrice; and that the charge was taken seriously to heart appears from a letter of Œcolampadius to Bucer which has been preserved.

The Swiss churches, as is known, were not all at one with Luther and his followers upon some of the transcendental topics of their common faith; and Servetus in his book having attacked the Doctrine of Justification by Faith—the leading feature in Luther’s theology, in terms neither complimentary nor respectful, the Switzers were anxious to have the great head of the Reform movement informed that they had nothing in common with the Serveto, alias Revés, of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ and that it had not fallen from any of the presses of their country. In his letter to Bucer dated from Basle, August 5, 1531, Œcolampadius informs him that ‘several of their friends had seen Servetus’s book and were beyond measure offended with it.’ ‘I wish you would write to Luther,’ he continues, ‘and tell him it was printed elsewhere than at Basle, and without any privity of ours. It is surely a piece of consummate impudence in the writer to say that the Lutherans are ignorant of what Justification really means. Passing many things by, I fancy he must belong to the sect of the Photinians, or to some other I know not what. Unless he be put down by the doctors of our church, it will be the worse for us. I pray you of all others to keep watch; and if you find no better or earlier opportunity, be particular in your report to the Emperor in excusing us and our churches from the breaking in among us of this wild beast. He indeed abuses everything in his way of viewing it; and to such lengths does he go that he disputes the coeternity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son—he would even have the man Christ to be the Son of God in the usual natural way.’[18]

Bucer having perused the ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’ would seem to have been excessively disturbed or scandalised by its contents. Known as a man of a perfectly humane disposition in a general way, he is now violent even to slaying. Denouncing its author from the pulpit, he is said to have declared that the writer of such a book deserved to be disembowelled and torn in pieces! Yet was not Martin Bützer always of this savage way of thinking. In a Preface and Postscript to an early work—a translation by a friend, of Augustin’s Treatise ‘on the Duty of the Ruler in matters of Religion,’[19] he is as mercifully disposed towards the erring as could be desired. They are to be prayed for, instructed, and it may be punished, but it is to be mildly; they are never to be put to death. He refers to his ‘Dialogues’ in which the subject is treated at length.

Luther, too, must have read the work, and it is not a little interesting to us to be made aware from what he says himself that he, like others of the Reformers, as well as Michael Servetus, had been troubled with doubts about the conformity of the orthodox Trinitarian dogma with the dictates of simple reason. In the Table-Talk—Tisch-Reden—of 1532, he refers to what he characterises as ‘a fearfully wicked book—ein greulich bös Buch—’ which had lately come out against the doctrine of the holy Trinity. ‘Visionaries like the writer,’ says Doctor Martin, ‘do not seem to fancy that other folks as well as they may have had temptations on this subject. But the sting did not hold; I set the word of God and the Holy Ghost against my thoughts and got free.’ Luther as usual imagined that the doubts he felt were inspired by the Devil, instead of by God, through the reason given him for his guidance.[20]

But of all his contemporaries Melanchthon appears to have been more taken with the work on Trinitarian Error than any other of the leading Reformers; and he is much more outspoken in expressing his opinion of the incomprehensible and really unscriptural nature of the dogma which it is the gist of Servetus’s book to impugn. To one of his friends he begins his letter by telling him ‘that he has been reading Servetus a great deal—Servetum multum lego—though I am well aware of the fanatical nature of the man. In his derisive treatment of Justification he sees nothing but the quality of Augustin; and he plainly raves when, misinterpreting the text of the Old and New Testament, he denies to the Prophets the Holy Spirit. I also think he does injustice both to Tertullian and Irenæus, when, treating of the Word, he makes them question its being an hypostasis. But I have little doubt that great controversies will one day arise on this subject, as well as on the distinction of the two natures in Christ.’[21]

To Camerarius, another friend, he writes: ‘You ask me what I think of Servetus? I see him indeed sufficiently sharp and subtle in disputation, but I do not give him credit for much depth. He is possessed, as it seems to me, of confused imaginations, and his thoughts are not well matured on the subjects he discusses. He manifestly talks foolishness when he speaks of Justification. Περὶ τῆς τρίαδος—on the subject of the Trinity—you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise. Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come: εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις ὁ λὀγος—is the Logos an hypostasis? εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις τὸ πνεῦμα—is the Holy Ghost an hypostasis? For my own part I refer me to those passages of Scripture that bid us call on Christ, which is to ascribe divine honours to him, and find them full of consolation.’[22]

This is surely very candid and beautiful. But the spirit of the Prophet of Nazareth did not always find such a resting place as it did in the heart and mind of Philip Schwarzerde, though he too could forget himself and approve of violence, as we shall see, when certain beliefs which he held sacred and thought it a public duty to profess were assailed. At this time, however, on this occasion, he is in his proper placable frame of mind and continues thus: ‘I find it after all of little use to inquire too curiously into that which properly constitutes the nature of a Person, and into that wherein and whereby persons are distinguished from one another. It is very provoking that in Epiphanius, except a few trifling passages, we have nothing from the days when the same questions were agitated by Paul of Samosata—nothing in fact whence we might know what was thought of Paul’s opinions at the time, and of what mind were they who condemned him. I am even greatly distressed when I think of such negligence on the part of the hierarchs of the age of this Paul, as well as of times more near our own.’ When writing thus Melanchthon plainly sympathised more with Paul of Samosata and his opinions than he would have liked to acknowledge at a later period of his life; for he, too, like so many who become narrow and intolerant in age, was liberal enough when younger, and in the earlier editions of his ‘Loci Theologici’ could speak of the Holy Spirit as nothing more than an ‘Afflatus of Deity.’

The above extracts from confidential letters seem to show that Melanchthon was not himself quite clear as to the sense in which a Trinity of the Godhead was to be understood; a state of mind shared in, unless we much mistake, by more than one among the most influential men of the Swiss Churches, by none more certainly than by Calvin, their great head, himself, as we shall show. Melanchthon indeed in his next letter to the same friend, speaking of Servetus’s assumption that Tertullian did not think the Logos an hypostasis—a distinct substantial reality—proceeds:—‘To me Tertullian seems to think on this subject as we do in public—quod publice sentimus, and not in the way Servetus interprets him. But of these things more hereafter when we meet.’ Melanchthon would not therefore trust in writing, even to an intimate friend, all he thought on the subject of the Trinity; and truly there is matter enough when critically scanned in the first edition of his best-known work—‘The Loci Theologici’ of 1521—that puts him out of the pale of orthodox Trinitarianism.[23]

Neither was Joannes Œcolampadius without something of a fellow feeling for Servetus, although he repudiated his conclusions. Writing to Martin Bucer on July 18, 1531, shortly after the publication of the work on Trinitarian misconception, he informs his friend that he had heard from Capito of Strasburg, who tells him that the book is for sale among them there, and has rejoiced some of the enemies of the Church, as it will also afford matter of gratulation to the Papists of France when they see that writings of the kind are suffered to be published in Germany. ‘Read the book,’ continues the writer, ‘and tell me what you think of it. Were I not busy with my Job, I should be disposed to answer it myself; but I must leave this duty to another with more leisure at command. Our Senate have forbidden the Spaniard’s book to be sold here. They have asked my opinion of its merits, and I have said that as the writer does not acknowledge the coeternity of the Son, I can in no wise approve of it as a whole, although it contains much else that is good—Etiamsi multa alia bona scribat.’[24]

In the days of Philip Melanchthon and Joannes Œcolampadius we therefore see that men had private opinions on subjects to which they were committed by their subscriptions, which differed we know not how widely from their public professions, precisely as among the ancients, and ourselves at the present time: culture would still seem to make an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine a necessity of existence.

Made aware, as we are by these letters of the Reformers, that Servetus’s book was causing a considerable stir both in Switzerland and Germany, it seems, in so far as we have ascertained, to have been entirely neglected by the Roman Catholics of these lands as well as of France. We have searched in vain for any notice of it in French theological writings of the period; neither have we been able to discover, though condemned and ordered to be suppressed by the Emperor Charles V. when brought under his notice by Cochlæus and Quintana at Ratisbon, that it figures at any early date on the Roman Index of prohibited books. There are good reasons for believing, nevertheless, that Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Misconception had a large amount of influence on Italian ground. It had been sent south in numbers; and aware of this Melanchthon took it upon him by-and-by to address the Senate of Venice on the subject, informing them that a highly objectionable work was for sale among them, and suggesting that measures should be taken for its suppression. The Sozzini, uncle and nephew—Lælius and Faustus Socinus—and their followers, the Unitarians, have consequently been seen as the disciples of Servetus, though it may be that they were so only indirectly; for Servetus himself, as we shall find, declares that he does not deny a kind of trinity in the unity of God. But his trinity is modal or formal, not real or personal in the usual sense of the word.

If overlooked by theologians of the Latin races, the work of our author appears to have attracted all the more attention from the men of Teutonic descent who had espoused the cause of the Reformation. In their ranks in the early period of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Europe, in so far as the religious question was concerned, seems to have been concentrated. They took pains to inform themselves generally on all that was going on in the republic of letters, and in so much of it very particularly as bore on the subject they had most at heart. It is among the Swiss and German Reformers consequently that we find any particular notice taken of Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Error. They alone show themselves scandalised by the opinions of its author and his style of expressing them, jealous too, it might seem, at the intrusion of a mere layman into their domain—a phenomenon as yet perfectly unheard of, and startled further by the advances they discovered in the book upon all that they, as inheritors of apostolic traditions in common with their Roman Catholic brethren (from whom in matters of Dogma they differed so little), regarded as the truth. Paul of Tarsus preaching his own independent gospel to the Gentiles, proclaiming the universality of the fatherhood of God, the nothingness of Circumcision, and, in opposition to the whole Levitical code, that all days were alike holy and that it was not what went into the mouth of a man that defiled him, could scarcely have been more ominous to the intolerant Nazarene Church of Jerusalem than was the appearance of this daring innovator upon the religious stage of Germany. His book, everywhere freely sold in the first instance, must have been read by everyone of liberal education, though it became so scarce ere long, denounced and decried as it must have been universally by the ministers, that twenty years afterwards a copy, most pressingly wanted, and eagerly sought after, was nowhere to be found in Switzerland; so effectually had zealotry succeeded in having it committed to the flames!

Strasburg and Basle, however, must have been the emporiums whence the supplies of the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis’ were sent forth; for after its author’s visit to the capital of Elsass and his happy delivery of this the first-born of his genius at Hagenau, we find him again in Basle and making himself obnoxious to Œcolampadius as before. Writing what we must presume to be a second or third letter to the Reformer, and complimenting him on what he is pleased to style his correspondent’s clear apprehension of Luther’s doctrine of Justification, Servetus goes on to make a personal request. ‘Somewhat fearful of writing to you again,’ he says, ‘lest I should molest you still more than I have already done, I yet venture to ask of you not to interfere with my sending the books to France which I have with me here, the book-fair of Lyons drawing near; for you of all men are better entitled than any one else to pronounce an opinion upon things unheard of until now. If you think it better that I should not remain here, I shall certainly take my leave; only, you are not to think that I go as a fugitive. God knows I have been sincere in all I have written, although my crude style perchance displeases you. I did not imagine you would take offence at what I say of the Lutherans; especially when from your own mouth I heard you declare you were of opinion that Luther had treated Charity in too off-hand a style; adding, as you did, that folks were charitable mostly when they had nothing else to think of. Melanchthon, too, as you know, affirms that God has no regard for charity. Such sayings, believe me, are more hurtful to the soul than anything I have ever written. And this all the more as I see that you are not agreed among yourselves on the subject of faith; for with my own ears I have heard you say one thing, which is otherwise declared by doctor Paulus, otherwise by Luther, and yet otherwise by Melanchthon;[25] and of this I admonished you in your own house; but you would not hear me.

‘Your rule for proving the Spirit, I think, deceives you; for, if in your own mind there be any fear, or doubt, or confusion, you cannot judge truly of me; and this the more because, although you know me in error in one thing, you ought not, therefore, to condemn me in others, else there were none who should escape burning a thousand times over. This truth is forced on us on all hands, most especially perhaps by the example of the Apostles, who sometimes erred. And, then, you do not condemn Luther in every particular, although you are well aware that he is mistaken in some things. I have myself entreated you to instruct me, which, however, you have not done. It is surely an infirmity of our human nature that none of us see our own faults, and so commonly look on those who differ from us as impious persons or impostors. I entreat you, for God’s sake, to spare my name and reputation. I say nothing of others who are not interested in the questions between us. You say that I would have no one punished or put to death, though all were thieves alike; but I call the omnipotent God to witness that this is not my opinion; nay, I scout any such conclusion. If I have spoken at any time on the subject (the punishment proper for heresy), it was because I saw it as a most serious matter to put men to death on the ground of mistake in interpreting the Scriptures; for do we not read that even the elect may err? You know full well that I have not treated my subject in so indifferent or indiscreet a manner as to deserve entire rejection at your hands. You make little yourself of speaking of the Holy Spirit as an angel, but think it a great crime in me when I say that the Son of God was a man.

‘Farewell.
‘Michael Serveto.’[26]

This letter, so characteristic of the writer, is full of interest even at the present hour. Servetus would have Œcolampadius instruct him; but the invariable complaint of all with whom he came in contact was that he could never be made to receive instruction; in other words, secure in his own conclusions, he thought his would-be instructors mistaken in theirs. And this, indeed, for good or ill, is characteristic of all who impress their age, and show themselves leaders in art, in science, in policy, or religion. Genius measures with its own rod, and is its own guide on the way it goes. The world is not moved by men who have all they own from teachers.

But especially worthy of note is the remark our writer makes on the serious responsibility men assume when they put each other to death for mistaken interpretations of Scripture. Had no scholar in modern times before Servetus come to so great and charitable a conclusion, we should still have to hallow the memory of the man who, more than three hundred years ago, had the head and the heart to proclaim so great a principle, in the enforcement of which in all its aspects the better spirits of the world still find such opposition; though it is not now by the infliction of death that bigotry and intolerance revenge themselves on their victims, the advocates of freethought and outspoken religious criticism.

A good deal has been said, by its author as well as others, of the crude style of the book on Trinitarian Error. But this to us seems the least of its faults—the language is generally simple enough, not Ciceronian certainly, but the meaning, save where the writer probably did not quite understand himself, is not doubtful. As a composition, it is the arrangement that is most defective. The parts have so little either of coherence or sequence, that of the seven books or chapters into which it is divided, the last, as it seems, might advantageously have been made the first. For there it is, and not until the penultimate page of the entire treatise is attained, that the key to the writer’s most important conclusions is discovered. ‘Two fundamental rules or principles,’ he says, ‘are to be steadily kept in view:—1st, That the nature of God cannot be conceived as divisible; and 2nd, That that which is accidental to the nature of anything is disposition.’ The corollary he would have to follow from these premisses or postulates being, that the orthodox idea of a Trinity, i.e., of the existence of three distinct persons or entities in the unity of the Godhead, is an impossibility, and so a fundamental religious error. As Servetus himself believed in God, and acknowledged a Son of God and a Holy Spirit—finding mention of these in the Scriptures, no word of which would he overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say—he held that the Son and Holy Ghost, in consonance with his Second Principle, must be what he calls dispositions, or dispensations of the one eternal indivisible Deity—in other words, manifestations of God in the world.

The ‘Idea of God’ to which Servetus had attained is unquestionably grand. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is eternal, one and indivisible, and in himself inscrutable, but making his being known in and through creation; so that not only is every living, but every lifeless thing, an aspect of the Deity. Before creation was, God was; but neither was he Light, nor Word, nor Spirit, but some ineffable thing else—sed quid aliud ineffabile—these, Light, Word, Spirit, being mere dispensations, modes or expressions of pre-existing Deity. (‘Dial.’ i. 4.) God, he says, has no proper nature; for this would imply a beginning; and before and after are terms that have no significance when they are referred to God. Though God knew what to man would be a future, his own prescience was without respect to time, and involved no such necessity as is implied in choice. God, he continues, can be defined by nothing that pertains to body; he created the world of himself, of his substance, and, as essence, he actuates—essentiat—all things. (‘Dial.’ ii.) The Spirit of God is the universal agent; it is in the air we breathe, and is the very breath of life; it moves the heavenly bodies; sends out the winds from their quarters; takes up and stores the water in the clouds, and pours it out as rain to fertilise the earth. God is therefore ever distinct from the universe of things, and when we speak of the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we but speak of the presence and power of God projected into creation, animating and actuating all that therein is, man more especially than aught else; ‘the Holy Spirit I always say is the motion of God in the soul of man, and that out of man there cannot properly be said to be any Holy Spirit.’ (‘De Trin. Err.’ f. 85, b, and ‘Dial.’ ii.) This is obviously a statement of what may be called the Exo-pantheistic principle in very broad terms, akin to what we find in the Grecian mythology and certain schools of philosophy; other than the Endo-pantheistic conception of later times—the Causa Principio et Uno of Giordano Bruno,[27] the Substantia of Spinoza, the Universum or Kosmos of Goethe,[28] Hegel, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, D. F. Strauss,[29] &c. It is the Principle inseparable from the mighty All as from the individual Atom, or Pantheism proper.

We shall, by-and-by, find our author, on his Geneva trial, damaging his case and exciting, we may imagine, the astonishment of the unlettered among his judges, by the assertion of his pantheistic notions, and arousing the needless, and it may even be, the assumed ire of Calvin—for he was familiar with the idea, having said himself that he only objected to call Nature, God, because it was a hard and improper expression—quia est dura et impropria loquutio.[30]

Criticising the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ Servetus maintains that the Greek λὀγος, translated Word with us, does not designate an entity but utterance or speech, as appears by its etymology, derived as it is from λἐγω, to speak, to discourse. Of the Word of God, therefore, to make the Son of God is to do as did the heathen, who turned ideas or abstractions into mythical beings—Echo into a Nymph, Fortitude into Minerva, &c., and so to bring discord and dissidence upon the truths of Scripture. (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 47, b.) The Word spoken by God in the beginning implies fore-thought, fore-knowledge; whence it is characterised as Wisdom, ‘that was from the beginning or ever the earth was. Under the mystery of the Word, the older apostolic tradition understood a certain dispensation whereby God willed to reveal himself to mankind. The Word of God therefore is equivalent to the Act of God; and even as Light came of the spoken word, so too came Creation, so too came Man.’ In this way, says our author, do we readily comprehend the expression of John: ‘The Word was made flesh,’ and learn in what sense Christ is truly the Word: ‘He is, as it were, the voice of God enunciating to mankind the will of the Universal Father.’ (Ib. f. 49 b.) The Word, consequently, is nothing different from God, but is God himself evoking all things, Christ among the number in the fulness of time. If a reasonable meaning is to be attached to mystical language, it seems difficult to imagine any more satisfactory interpretation than this of Servetus, with which we see that of a distinguished liberal divine of our own day essentially to agree, as he says: ‘The Logos of the New Testament means not only the Word as translated, but Reason, Intelligence, communicating itself in thought and speech. It is the divine wisdom which was from the beginning in the mind of God made manifest in time.’[31]

The title Son of God, again, Servetus maintains is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures otherwise applied than to a man—to the man Jesus in particular; and the word Person he insists is always to be understood in the sense of the Greek προσῶπον and the Latin persona, a mask, an appearance, and not any real or individual thing. With this style of exposition the Reformers could of course by no means agree. They had adopted all the symbols of their predecessors of the Church of Rome; and it seems to have been Servetus’ insistance on his own divergent interpretation of the language of John and the creeds that more especially aroused the enmity of Œcolampadius, Bucer, Calvin, and the rest, they holding that to be accounted a Christian it was necessary not only to acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God, which Servetus was quite ready to do, in the way he understood the filiation, but to acknowledge him to be the Logos or Word of St. John, consubstantial and coeternal with the Father—which, to Servetus, was impossible. It is probable that the way and manner in which in any conceivable fashion such coeternity and consubstantiality could be apprehended was among the topics on which Servetus craved enlightenment from Œcolampadius; and as he could obtain none, pique and personal dislike, opposition and enmity, took the place of dispassionate and friendly discussion; precisely as happened in later years and mainly on the same subjects between our author and Calvin.

In his attempt to develope and explain his own conception of the mystery of the Trinity—for it is a mistake to suppose that Servetus was opposed to something of the kind—he does not set out like the writer of the Fourth Gospel from the transcendental Word, but starts with the historical Jesus, the man, the reputed son of Joseph the Carpenter, but verily or naturally, as he says, the Son of God. To this son the name Jesus was given at the time of his circumcision, the title Christ being conferred by his disciples; whilst it was only at his baptism that he was designated Son of God. The Holy Spirit and power of the Highest overshadowing the Virgin Mary, and acting in her as generator or generative dew, Jesus the Son of God and her Son was engendered. It is not the Word consequently, but Jesus the Son of Mary who is a Son of God: ‘The holy thing that shall be born of thee,’ says the angel addressing the Virgin, ‘shall be called a Son of God.’ ‘They therefore plainly err,’ says Servetus, ‘who speak of the Word as the Son of God: the man Jesus was the Son of God, not the Word; the man Jesus engendered, as stated above, by God in the womb of the Virgin.’ ‘All the Trinitarian errors,’ he concludes, ‘have arisen from not understanding the true nature of the Incarnation.’

When he comes to speak of the Holy Ghost, Servetus unhappily forgets what is due to the discussion of a subject that has engaged the serious thoughts of so many pious men. He would seem to have seen some portions of the catholic Christian dogma as so unreasonable that they were even open to ridicule; and this leads him to the use of improper language. The Holy Ghost, he maintains, is never spoken of save confusedly in the Scriptures, the term being applied variously now to an angel, now to the soul of man, and again to nothing more than wind or breath (Ib. f. 22, a.). The Hebrew word Ruach, of which spirit or wind is a translation, has indeed a still greater variety of meanings. On a subject so indefinite and undefined as the Holy Spirit, we cannot wonder that Œcolampadius in one of his letters should declare he can make nothing of what Servetus says on the matter—‘dicit nescio quid—he says I know not what.’ This much, however, we do make out as our author’s opinion, viz.: that the Holy Spirit is nowhere spoken of in Scripture as a distinct and independent entity, but always as a motion, an agency, an afflatus of God or the power of God,—a view in which he certainly had Melanchthon as his predecessor: ‘Nec aliud spiritus sanctus est nisi viva Dei voluntas et agitatio.’ (‘Loci Theol.’ p. 128, ed. 1521.)

Referring to the dogma of the ‘Two Natures,’ Servetus holds that this, too, is founded in error. ‘To speak of the Nature of God,’ he says, ‘is absurd; for the word nature can only apply to something created, something born (from the Latin natus). But God is from Eternity. For my own part,’ he proceeds, ‘I never take nature to signify aught but the thing to which the term is applied—the nature of a thing is the thing itself. To use the word nature in connection with the name of God is, therefore, to speak of God himself. And so of the Son of God: that which was an idea, image, or type of the Son in the mind of God, when the Word was made flesh, became or was Christ, Reality then superseding Idea (‘De Tr. Er.’ f. 92). There was consequently no aggregate of two natures or two different things in Christ; he was one entity or person, in the usual sense of the word.’ Servetus very inconsistently, as it seems at first sight, often speaks of the man Jesus as God. But he can do so only on the same ground as Cyrus in the Bible, Augustus Cæesar, and other rulers, are called Dii or Divi—gods. The Son of God, to Servetus, in conformity with the pantheistic idea, can only be an aspect or Mode of the One God. If this be not his meaning, I know not what it is.

We have said above that Servetus is not opposed to the idea of a Trinity of dispositions, powers, or properties in the Deity, but only denies such a trinity of persons or entities as is embodied in the symbols of orthodox Christianity. It is not unimportant, therefore, to learn what the precise idea was which he had of the threefold state he acknowledged as extant in the essence of God. His words are these: ‘Tres sunt admirandi Dei dispositiones in quarum qualibet divinitas relucet, ex quo sanissime Trinitatem intelligere posses, &c.—There are three admirable dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears, and from which you may satisfactorily understand the Trinity. For the Father is the one God, from whom proceed certain dispensations. But these imply no distinction into separate entities. By the economy of God—Dei οἰκονομίαν—they are no more than so many forms or aspects of Deity; for the divineness that is in the Father, the same is in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.’

In another passage, he asserts his belief in a Trinity still more distinctly: ‘I concede one person of the Father, another person of the Son, another person of the Holy Ghost: three persons in one God, and this is the true Trinity.’ (Ib. f. 64, b.) Had we not our author’s explanation of the way in which he understands the word person, this would make his conception, in so far, not different from the orthodox interpretation of the mystery. But his language here must be regretted, for it is misleading, the word person with Servetus not signifying, as we have seen, any real or individual entity distinct from other entities, but property, appearance, or outward manifestation. The second and third persons, therefore, as understood by Servetus, are to be thought of as dispositions or modes of God, the universal Father, and not as individuals or persons in the usual acceptation of these words, though of them it is that distinct personages have been made, and spoken of as being at once God and other than God, as being three and yet no more than one.

In sequence to this, our author goes on to say that ‘he will not make use of the word Trinity, which is not to be found in Scripture, and only seems to perpetuate philosophical error. It were well, indeed,’ he continues, ‘that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men’ (Ib. f. 64, b.); words in which we see reason getting the better of subserviency to the letter of Scripture, and putting an extinguisher, as it were, upon his own as well as other vain attempts to give a rational explanation of the mystical Neo-Platonic Logos-Doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, of which the Trinitarian Church-Dogma is the outcome. Hampered, however, by the idea that everything in the Bible is the word of God, Servetus insists on trying to find, for himself and his readers, something like an acceptable interpretation of the leading words of the Imaginative Mystical Discourse entitled the Gospel according to John. In this he fails, as might have been anticipated; and then, his eyes being opened to the fact, he has nothing for it but to conclude that the orthodox Trinitarian mystery were well discarded from the thoughts and the beliefs of man. ‘To believe, however,’ he continues, ‘suffices, it is said; but what folly to believe aught that cannot be understood, that is impossible in the nature of things, and that may even be looked on as blasphemous! Can it be that mere confusion of mind is to be assumed as an adequate object of faith?’ (Ib. f. 33, b.)

The Trinitarian doctrine of dogmatic Christianity Servetus held to have been a great obstacle to the spread of the religion of Christ. Opposed to the conception of the Oneness of Deity to which the Jews had finally attained, the religious system in which it was made so prominent an element, could not possibly be accepted by them; neither, on the same ground, could it be received by Islam; for Mahomet, whilst he acknowledged Jesus as a prophet and power in the world, born of a Virgin, too, like other distinguished individuals, in some incomprehensible manner, never for a moment thought of him as the Son of God; for ‘God,’ says he, ‘as he is not engendered, so neither does he engender.’

But it is not in connexion with the subject of the Trinity alone that Servetus shows the advances he had made on his age in the sphere of Biblical exposition. Commenting on the text, ‘No man hath ascended up to heaven but he who came down from heaven’ (John iii. 13), he says: ‘It is the spiritual heaven that is here to be understood, and this exists wherever Christ is; “to ascend to heaven” means no more than to discourse of heavenly things. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” says the text (Ib. xiv. 9), i.e., says our expositor, ‘he who appreciates the priceless treasures of Christ’s love easily attains to a knowledge of God the Father. But how should an invisible, intangible Word give us to know God?’ (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 46 et seq.)

There are others among the accepted doctrines of the reformed Churches which, as repudiated by Servetus and so arraying the whole of their adherents against him and influencing his fate, require a passing notice at our hands. Justification by Faith, for instance, he maintains, comes not by belief in the merits or sufferings of Christ, but by belief in his worth or dignity as Son of God. On this ground, he says, the Lutherans do not understand what Justification really is. It is by belief of the kind he specifies, however, that we show our obedience to God, accept the new covenant instead of the old law, become the children of our heavenly Father, and have the Holy Spirit imparted to us. Such belief is, in fact, the very kernel of the Christian dispensation, and that on which the new covenant of grace reposes. It is the real rock on which Peter was to build the Church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail. But as hell does seem to have got the upper hand, he adds, we can only conclude that neither the Church on the rock nor the true Faith is now to be found among us. The Lutheran Justification by Faith, in a word, is mere magical fascination and folly (f. 82-84, Conf. ‘Ep. ad Calvin.’ xiii.).

But Faith, even the most fervent, is not yet sufficient for salvation. The Justification thereby attained is still no more than negative in kind; to become positive, it must be associated with Love, i.e., with Charity in the widest sense of the word; with the Love, that is the fulfilment of the law, whereby alone do we secure for ourselves treasures in heaven. Faith is the entrance, Charity the sanctuary—Fides ostium, Charitas perfectio; and there is a fine passage in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ (p. 349), comparable in some sort to Paul’s eloquent outburst on the excellence of that much misused sentiment. When Servetus speaks of Charity, therefore, it is not the eleemosynary idea of his day that is meant, with its mendicant friars, its convent doles, and its engendered sloth and beggary; neither is it the mistaken view of later days, which gives indolence and improvidence a legal claim on industry and thrift. It is of the nobler, truer kind that, beside good works, gives man a right to think and to speak unfettered, and forbids him to fancy that his brother is damned for divergency in theological opinion.

To the leading Calvinistic doctrines of Predestination and Election, involving as they do fettered instead of free will, Servetus is still more violently opposed than to the Lutheran Justification by Faith. ‘In your fatal, not to say fatuous, necessity of all things, or your servile will,’ says he, at a later period in his life, ‘there is a certain show of folly, seeing that you would have a man do that which you must know he cannot do. You speak of free acts, yet tell us there is no such thing as free action. And it is absurd in you to derive the servile will you abet from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us, and in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all acts proceed essentially from him. But the power in us to do is one thing, the necessity of doing is another; and though God may deal with us as the potter deals with his clay, it does not follow that we are nothing more than clay, and have no power of action in ourselves.’ (Ib f. 79, b, et ‘Epist. ad Calvinum,’ xxii.)

Another of the most essential doctrines underlying Pauline Christianity, original sin, is made little of by Servetus. Although I spent much time in reading his books, I do not appear to have made a note of more than one or two passages in which he refers to that subject; and when he does, it is by the way rather than more particularly. It is on the necessity of faith in Christ, as he understands the Sonship, that he dwells continually, making of this the prime factor in his scheme of restored Christianity. ‘This faith it is,’ says he, ‘that first makes us aware of our poverty, of our misery; for if we believe that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, we already assume that the world is sinful, and requires saving’ (‘Chr. Rest.’ p. 349). He does not refer particularly to what is called ‘the Fall,’ neither does he say very pointedly how the world came into the sorry plight in which he admits that he finds it. The reason usually assigned must have appeared unsatisfactory to an understanding so clear as that of Servetus, when unclouded by fancies of his own creating; but we can hardly think he mends matters by ascribing the origin of sin to heaven and the rebellion of the angels, as he does, instead of to the earth and Adam’s disobedience. Far from maintaining that the heart of man is corrupt and evil by nature, he holds that the cause of good works and well-doing is proper and spontaneous to the individual, who is only answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another. Faith in Christ, therefore, as the naturally-begotten Son of God; Charity, in which are comprised all the virtues, and a good life, in so far as we can make it out, form the backbone of Servetus’s Christianity, as it is unfolded in his earliest work on ‘Current Misconceptions of the Trinity.’[32]

CHAPTER VI.

THE AUTHORITIES OF BASLE TAKE NOTICE OF HIS BOOK. HE WRITES TWO DIALOGUES BY WAY OF APPENDIX TO IT AND LEAVES SWITZERLAND.

Failing to make any impression on the Swiss and German Reformers whose countenance he had been so anxious to gain, we have seen Servetus in his letter to Œcolampadius declaring his readiness to quit Basle, to which he must have returned, if it were only not said that he went as a fugitive, and giving something like an engagement to his correspondent to review and, reviewing, to modify or retract some things he had said in his book. That some such engagement was given we conclude from the letter of Œcolampadius to the magistrates of Basle, to which we shall refer immediately, and from which it would seem that it was through the forbearance, if not even the more friendly interference, of the Reformer that our author escaped arrest and imprisonment at this time. The seven books or chapters on erroneous ideas of the Trinity had not fallen stillborn from the press; neither had the presence of the writer in Basle passed unobserved. The book being seen as heretical in the highest degree by the ministers, the presence of its writer among them was felt as matter of grievance by both clergy and laity; so that the Civic Council held it within the scope of their duties to take notice of the innovator, of whom they heard so much that was discreditable, and, by laying hands on him, either to make him pay in person then and there, or to send him away, like an infected bale, to spread his poison elsewhere.

Previous to acting, however, they thought it would be well to have the opinion of their chief Pastor, Œcolampadius, on what had best be done, and so requested him to advise with them on the subject. He replied by a long letter in which he recapitulates the chief topics discussed by Servetus in his treatise. ‘He, Œcolampadius, will do what he can to place the good man’s views before them,—if indeed he may venture to speak of the writer as a good man; for it seems that he strives at times as much to darken the light as to enlighten the darkness, mixing up incongruities rashly and not seldom stopping short of contradicting himself. He opposes the orthodox doctors continually, and uses certain words in an arbitrary and unusual sense. He denies the coeternity of the Father and the Son, a doctrine hitherto held sacred by all the Christian churches; and only recognises the sonship from the moment of the engenderment, or rather of the birth of Christ. He even derides the idea of God having a son from eternity, and asks whence the heavenly father had his wife, or whether he were of both sexes in himself? He will only recognise the eternity of the Son as an Idea in the divine mind: the Son was to be, but was not yet, until he appeared in the flesh. He will by no means concede that the Word of St. John was the Christ; yet he speaks of three persons in the one God; but it is with glozing and an arbitrary meaning attached to the word person, and with reasonings which, if they sometimes make for his views, are at other times opposed to them, he neither thinking nor speaking as do the apostles, and wresting the words of the fathers—of Tertullian and Irenæus especially—from the interpretation commonly put upon them.

‘Along with all this and much more that is objectionable, there are still some things in the book that are good; nevertheless as a whole it could not but offend me. God grant that the writer acknowledge the rashness which has led him to speak so unadvisedly as he has done of matters which transcend our human intelligence, and that he may live to amend what he has said. As to the book, it would be well perhaps that it were either totally suppressed, or were read by those only who are not likely to be hurt by objectionable writings. The errors he has fallen into acknowledged, he will retract in his writings—retractârit scriptis. Perhaps he was not himself aware of their extent, or they were not seen by him as of such importance as they are in fact. But I leave all to your prudence and discretion, humbly commending myself and my work to your favour.’[33]

If we are to understand the retractârit scriptis of the above as a promise from Servetus to retract in a future work what he has said in his first, he certainly did not keep his word in the ‘Dialogi de Trinitate,’[34] which he published in the course of the following year. In the Preface to these dialogues, it is true, he informs the candid reader that he retracts all he had ‘lately written in the seven books of erroneous conceptions concerning the Trinity, not because what I say there is false, but because the work is imperfect and written as it were by a child for children. I pray you nevertheless to hold by so much as you find there that may help you to understand the subjects discussed. All that is barbarous, confused and faulty, ascribe to my inexperience and the carelessness of the printer. I would not that any Christian were offended by what I say; for God is used sometimes to make known his wisdom to the world by weak vessels. Look at the thing itself, therefore, I pray you, and if you take good heed, my stammering will prove no hindrance to you.’

The reputed printer of Servetus’s Treatise and Two Dialogues, Jo. Secerius, has no particular name as a typographer. But these little works are by no means incorrectly printed; they show few typographical errors—so few that they must almost certainly have been read for press by the writer himself. The printer therefore is not to be blamed for any shortcomings of the kind referred to by the author—if there be defect it is his own, and it was the matter not the manner that had been found fault with. But the Preface is apologetic in directions uncalled for, and is meaningless in fact. Servetus did not think himself a weak vessel; neither did he look on his work as the work of a child for children; and as for any retractation of his opinions, nothing seems to have been further from his mind. On the contrary the mysticism of the writer of the Fourth Gospel appears to have taken a firmer hold of our author than it had done before, and to have acted as fresh ferment to the mystical element so abundant in his proper nature. There may be modification of some of the views already enunciated, but from none of them is there recession. The opposition he met with from the leading Reformers seems even to have added point and precision to his writing. He is more outspoken than before, and is still less chary in the kind of language he uses towards opponents. The usual conception of a partitioned Deity he declares to be simply blasphemous; they who seriously entertain it are fools, and so blind that were Christ to come among them now and declare he was the Son of God, they would crucify him anew. The Dialogues, instead of any denial and retractation, are a reiteration and defence of almost all he has said in his first production; although, indeed, we do observe that where he can he occasionally approximates somewhat to more orthodox views; in that passage very notably where he speaks of the Son being of the same essence (homousios), and even consubstantial with the Father. (‘Dial.’ i., f. II, b.) But these are really no more than words set down under the varying impulses of mind to which the writer gave way, and are deprived of any meaning that might attach to them by something that has either gone before or that comes immediately after.

The discussion of Luther’s Justification by Faith, to which it must be presumed his attention had been particularly called by Œcolampadius as likely to be offensive to the Lutherans, is renewed in the Dialogues; and the writer is so far carried away by his own exaggerated estimate of the mental condition implied in faith or belief, that he seems even to accept in toto the principle he would controvert. Though he is elsewhere and ever so emphatic in praise of good works or charity, we here find him not sparing in condemnation of those who hope through their doings of any kind to achieve salvation. Monks and nuns accordingly, who sin more especially in this direction and who by the assumption of peculiar habits and behaviour think to make themselves agreeable to God, are an especial abomination to him. Man, he declares, cannot be justified by the observance of vows or rules of any kind; for these are not written in the law of God, and in themselves are without significance. ‘A most pestilent thing it is, that Papal decrees and monastic vows are assumed as means of salvation. When men bind themselves by vows to particular observances, they virtually declare that the salvation they have through Christ is insufficient, and lay themselves fast in those bonds of the law from which Christ came to set them free.’

In spite of frequently recurring contradictions and something that is objectionable on the score of taste, we nevertheless think that no one, however little disposed to abet Servetus’s general views, could peruse these dialogues without coming to the conclusion that the writer was a man of a sincerely pious nature, who had read much, and reflected deeply, feeling it a necessity of his nature to expend himself in the mystical verbiage in which religious enthusiasm loves to robe itself as in a sufficient and seemly garment.

The seven Books and two Dialogues on the Trinity of Servetus have been spoken of as an attempt to hold a middle course between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed churches; and there may be something to warrant such a conclusion from what is said in the chapter ‘De Justitia Regni Christi.’ But Servetus’s Trinity is of another kind from that of either the older or the younger sister, and where not assimilable to the Neoplatonic ideas of Philo, it followed from the Pantheistic principles which, like deep thinkers in general, he had adopted. God to Servetus was the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, the One and the All; and if at any time he speaks of Christ as God, it is as a manifestation of the Divine in human form—a dispensation in his own phraseology, a mode in Spinozistic language. The Divine Unity, and its manifestation in the world in infinite modes, may be said to be the fundamental idea in the philosophical as well as the theological system of Servetus.[35]

CHAPTER VII.

PARIS. ASSUMPTION OF THE NAME OF VILLENEUVE OR VILLANOVANUS. ACQUAINTANCE WITH CALVIN.

His indifferent reception by the German and Swiss Reformers must have satisfied Servetus that there was no abiding place for him among them. He was doubtless disappointed and not a little disconcerted by the treatment he met with at their hands. He had come as a light-bringer, as a fellow striver for the Truth through independent reading of the Scriptures. Studious and learned; smitten with divine philosophy; emancipated from the fetters of the church of Rome; tolerant and charitable, he doubtless thought that the liberal studies in Humanity and the Greek letters in which he knew the Reformers excelled, must as a matter of course have imparted to them something of the liberality and comprehensiveness he felt in himself. Face to face with their leaders in Basle and Strasburg, however, he was undeceived; and when he saw that his book on Trinitarian Error, instead of bringing him fame and friends, earned him nothing but evil report and enemies, and might even compromise his personal safety, there was nothing left for him but to pack up and begone.

He must have quitted Switzerland immediately after writing his letter to Œcolampadius, and in all likelihood taken up his quarters at Hagenau, where he lived quietly for some weeks or months engaged in writing and supervising the printing of the ‘Two Dialogues,’ with which and the concluding anathema against all tyrants of the church, as a parting shot, he went on his way to France, reaching Paris towards the end of 1532. He had in fact made the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Elsass where he was known, too hot for him, to use a familiar phrase; and the parts where French was the mother tongue had not yet taken up with Calvin or another great name opposed to the Papacy, that might have led his thoughts towards them. He was besides but indifferently acquainted with the German language; in circumstances, too, we may presume, that made it impossible for him to remain in any place where he had not remunerative occupation of some sort; and this, with the whole world of the Reformation against him, he saw he could not now obtain in quarters where he had once hoped to find a welcome and a footing. He had therefore no choice left but retreat; and Paris was the place where accomplishments of the kind he possessed were most likely to find a market.

With all his hardihood and self-confidence, Servetus was not without so much prudence as assured him that a certain amount of caution and reticence was required of everyone who would live at peace among his fellow men. He doubtless imagined at one time, but had already discovered his mistake, that among heretics, as he had been accustomed to hear the Reformers designated, he might freely expend himself in heresy. To the very end of his life, he seems to have had some difficulty in divining why he had not been welcomed by them with open arms as a brother. But he was well aware that Roman Catholic France had yet less in common with Michael Serveto, alias Revés, author of the Seven books and Two dialogues on Trinitarian Error, than Protestant Switzerland and Germany.

Servetus felt that the writer of these works could not safely show himself in Paris under either his proper family or his maternal name, and so fell readily upon one derived from the town of his nativity, Villanueva. Servetus seems indeed at no time to have been very particular as to his name and designation. On his trial at Vienne he is of Tudela in Navarre, on that at Geneva, of Villanova in Aragon; and Tollin finds him inscribed in the academic register of Paris (1536) and in that of Montpellier, which he must have visited some time in 1540, as neither of Tudela nor Villanova, but of Saragossa! During all the years he lived in France, he was never known save as Monsieur Michel Villeneuve, or, when he wrote in Latin, as Michael Villanovanus. Under the name of Villeneuve he now announced himself, entered as student of mathematics and physics at one of the colleges, and at a later period took his degrees of M.A. and M.D. in the University of Paris. Under the same name he subsequently wrote and edited various works at Lyons; and it was as M. Villeneuve that he finally became known in the town of Vienne in Dauphiny, where he lived for twelve years engaged in the practice of medicine, and on terms of intimacy with the Archbishop and all the notabilities of the place, both lay and clerical.

As a man of scholarly acquirements Servetus in the first instance probably found employment, and the means of living with some of the typographers of Paris, as reader and corrector of the press, a line of life which he certainly followed for the next three or four years, in the course of which we find notices of him first at Orleans, then at Avignon, and finally at Lyons, one of the chief centres of the printing and publishing business that had been called into such vigorous life by the revival of learning, the discovery of the art of printing with moveable types, and finally and very essentially by the Reformation.

It was during his first residence of about two years at Paris, 1532-1534, that he made the acquaintance of the man who became in the end his most implacable enemy, and the immediate cause of his untimely and cruel death. This was no other than the celebrated John Calvin, then a young man and about the same age as himself. Partially emancipated from the fetters of the faith in which he had been born and bred, but not less firmly bound in others of his own fashioning, Calvin had already attracted the notice of his friends and the public by his natural abilities and his scholarly acquirements, and been pointed out as likely to influence the progress of the Reformation in his native France. Hearing of Calvin’s presence in Paris, Servetus as Villeneuve must have sought him out, and, still full of the familiar theological subject, have made an attempt upon him as he had already done upon Œcolampadius and the others, for countenance and approval in the discovery he had made of what he believed to be the true saving Christian faith. But with no better success we must conclude; for though the two young men met oftener than once in private, it was without coming to any agreement. They had, therefore, actually resolved on a public discussion, with a view to the voidance of their theological differences.

This, however, never came to pass. Such an exhibition, indeed, could not have taken place at the time without danger to both. Calvin, in his young zeal, and for what he held to be the honour of God, would have faced the danger, but the individual known to his Parisian friends and Calvin as Michel Villeneuve must have seen on afterthought that he could make no public appearance as defender of the outré opinions he entertained, without betraying the Michael Serveto of the De Trinitatis Erroribus and Dialogues who lay hidden behind the adopted name; and this he knew would be not only to disconcert all his present plans, but assuredly to compromise his life. Calvin, we must presume, had not at this time heard of Servetus’s books; very certainly he had not read them; for one so acute and well-informed on theological matters as he, would not have been more than a few minutes face to face with their author without detecting him. But we find no hint in Calvin’s writings that he then surmised who Villeneuve, his Parisian acquaintance, really was, and conclude that he lived for a dozen years or more without suspecting that the individual he discovered as Michael Serveto of the Book on Trinitarian Error in his correspondent of Vienne, of the year 1546, was the same Villeneuve he had known in Paris in 1534.

Calvin then would have faced the danger of the public discussion, though persecution was hot at the time against heresy, and he was not unsuspected on this score. The danger to him, however, would have been slight in comparison with that which Servetus must have incurred. Calvin would not have stood forth on this occasion as the defender of any heresy, but of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith as embodied in its Creeds; to some of the most essential propositions in which Servetus, on the contrary, must have shown himself diametrically opposed. Servetus therefore, in this instance at least, saw perforce that discretion was the better part of valour, and wisely stayed away. He was in truth far too deeply compromised to venture on an appearance; for if discovered to be Michael Serveto, nothing could have saved him from the heretic’s death. He had nothing for it therefore but to forfeit his engagement and lay himself open to Calvin’s reproachful ‘vous avez fuy la luite’—you fled the encounter—of a later and to him more momentous epoch in their common lives.

CHAPTER VIII.

LYONS. ENGAGEMENT AS READER FOR THE PRESS WITH THE TRECHSELS. EDITS THE GEOGRAPHY OF PTOLEMY.

Theology, however, after which we see Servetus still hankering—hæret lateri letalis arundo!—and even the study of the mathematics on which he was now engaged, had to be abandoned for present means of subsistence; and as Lyons seemed even a better field for the scholar than Paris, to Lyons, after a short stay at Avignon and Orleans, he betook himself. There he appears immediately to have found employment as reader and corrector of the press in the house of the distinguished typographers, the Brothers Trechsel; and if the Age have its character from the aggregate of its science and culture, and the Individual his bent from his more immediate surroundings, we cannot but think of Servetus’s connection with these light-spreaders as another among the highly influential events in his life.

Books in the early days of printing were much more generally written in Latin than in the vernacular, and ever more and more with references to Greek, lately brought greatly into vogue by Erasmus and the Reformers. The reader for press in the best establishments was therefore, and of necessity, a scholar and man of letters; and the opportunities for improvement now put in the way of one like Servetus, even whilst pursuing the mechanical part of his duties, have only to be hinted at to be appreciated. The reading room of the distinguished typographers of those days was, indeed in some sort, a continuation of school and college to the competent corrector of the press.

Servetus’s liberal elementary education, therefore, stood him in good stead at this time; for the Trechsels ere long, instead of holding him to the subordinate though still important duties of reader and corrector, engaged him further as editor of various costly works that issued from their press. Among the number of these a handsome edition of the Geography of Ptolemy[36] deserves particular mention, both as evincing the good repute in which he stood when we find him entrusted with such a work, and also as showing the extent of his reading and general knowledge—strangely enough, also, as influencing in some remote degree the fate that finally befel him.

Earlier editions of the Ptolemy were faulty in several ways, and disfigured in different degrees by errors due, in part at least, to indifferent editing. These, where literal, Villanovanus corrected in the new issue; and where the sense was obscure through faulty wording, he brought light by the better readings he supplied, having formed his text, as he says, by collating all the editions he could lay his hands on, and where these gave him no aid, by suggestions of his own.

In his address to the reader, our editor, whom we shall often speak of under his adopted name of Villanovanus, gives a short account of his author, Claudius Ptolemæus, his birth-place, the Roman emperors under whom he flourished, ‘his knowledge of philosophy and the mathematics, and the more than Herculean glory he achieved by his successful but peaceful invasion of so many lands. Nor indeed was this all, for he may be said to have bound earth to heaven by assimilating the measurements of the one to those of the other; and, coming after Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela, he as far surpassed them, as they excelled all the geographers who had gone before them.’

But Villanovanus did much more than edit and amend the text of Ptolemy. ‘We,’ he says, ‘have added scholia to the text, whereby the book is made more interesting and more complete. Using our familiarity with the historical, poetical, and miscellaneous writings of the Greeks and Romans, in so far as they bear on our subject, we have given the names by which the countries, mountains, rivers, and cities were known to them; and, to aid the tyro, have further translated the ancient titles of places into those by which they are now designated—into French for France, Italian for Italy, German for Germany, &c., all of which countries we have seen, besides having a knowledge of their languages.’ Extending his vision beyond the mere physical features of the lands he is passing under review, he might have added that he also gives short, but graphic accounts of their inhabitants, the prominent traits of their character, their manners, customs, &c., which are extremely interesting. But Michael Villanovanus is not one of those who hide themselves behind their good works, and so is he now careful to inform his readers of the pains he has taken in their behalf. By them, he says, he hopes his vigils will be properly appreciated, ‘for day and night have I laboured assiduously at my task—dies noctesque jugiter laboravi.’ He concludes his preliminary address in these words: ‘No one, I imagine, will under-estimate the labour, though pleasant in itself, that is implied in the collation of our text with that of other earlier editions, unless it be some Zoilus of the contracted brow, who cannot without envy look on the serious labours of others. But thou, candid reader, whoever thou art, we trust wilt be well disposed, kindly to receive and to approve our work. Farewell!’

Villanovanus’s edition of the Ptolemy is certainly an advance on that of Bilibald Pirckheimer, which formed its groundwork; but it is not so free from literal errors as the laudatory address of the editor might lead us to expect. And it would have been better had he said that he had enlarged and improved the short and meagre scholia of his editorial predecessor than spoken as if he had supplied them wholly of himself. Villanovanus’s improved comments, however, impress us very favourably with a sense of the pains he must have bestowed on the work, and arouse our respect for the extent and variety of the reading he had undertaken to obtain the information he brings to bear on the physical aspects and natural productions of the several countries described, as well as of the customs, manners, and moral qualities of their inhabitants. Now it was that the smattering of geographic and historic lore he may have picked up as a student at Saragossa and elsewhere stood him in good stead, enabling him, as it did, to advance and profit by the ample stores of information of the kind which the city of Lyons placed within his reach. Living immediately after the age of the great navigators—Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, the Vespucii, and the rest—and in the very days when the works of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, Simon Grynæus, Sebastian Munster, and others enabled the educated to acquire something like a true knowledge of the world they lived in, the new edition of Ptolemy by Michael Villanovanus was a happy thought, and contributed, we need not doubt, no less to his own development than to the spread of useful and humanising information. Engaged on the Ptolemy, the super-subtleties of scholasticism and theology seem to have vanished before the light of the more positive kind of knowledge that now broke around him.

When we turn to the writings of the able individuals mentioned above, we have no difficulty in discovering whence Servetus had most, perhaps all, of his geographical and astronomical knowledge. The Opus Epistolarum of Angleria, in particular, seems to have been the mine from whence he made himself rich in mental wealth of many kinds. We find him imitating, and even improving upon, the lines which head Angleria’s De Rebus Oceanicis and Grynæus’s Typi Cosmographici, as the reader may see by comparing the verse below[37] with the one he will find further on, which is prefixed to the 2nd edition of the Ptolemy.

Turning to the Scholia of Villanovanus, we find it not a little interesting in these days to have a glimpse of ourselves in our sires, and of our neighbours in theirs, from the pen of a man of genius hard upon three centuries and a half ago; and as Michael Servetus is really only known to us through his works and the judicial trials he underwent, we make no apology for referring briefly to his additions to the bald and matter-of-fact text of the original Ptolemy.

The map of the first country in the series of fifty by which the work is illustrated is that of Great Britain. The people of Scotland, Villanovanus informs his reader, are hot-tempered, prone to revenge, and fierce in their anger; but valiant in war and patient beyond belief of cold, hunger, and fatigue. They are handsome in person, and their clothing and language are the same as those of the Irish, their tunics being dyed yellow, their legs bare, and their feet protected by sandals of undressed hide with the hair on. They live mainly on fish and flesh; they have numerous flocks, mostly of sheep, for the country is free from wolves; and they have milk and cheese in abundance. Their arms are bows and arrows and broad swords—lati gladii. Instead of wood, they have coal for fuel. Unlike the people of the last few generations, he says the Scotch are not a particularly religious people. He ‘who never feared the face of man,’ as the Earl of Morton said of Knox, when looking down on his dead body, had not yet made himself felt in the land of his birth; and the School-house had not yet risen as a necessary complement to the Kirk and the Manse, to make the people of Scotland what they have become since his day—among the very foremost of the sons of men.

England, Villanovanus observes, is wonderfully well peopled, and the inhabitants are long-lived. Tall in stature, they are fair in complexion, and have blue eyes. They are brave in war, and admirable bowmen. He has the familiar tale of the English children seen as captives at Rome by the blessed Gregory, who said they were called Angli, indeed; but in form and feature showed like Angeli. He must, as it seems, have given some little attention to the English language, if he did not study it more particularly. He says it is so difficult to learn and to pronounce, because the people who speak it are a compound of so many different races.

Of Ireland and the Irish our editor does not speak so favourably. The country, he observes, is generally marshy, so that, unless the summers are dry, the cattle are apt to get lost in the bogs. It is free from noxious creatures of every kind, there being no reptiles, such as snakes, toads, and frogs, and no insects, such as spiders and bees—a state of things which, if it ever obtained, certainly does so no longer. The climate is very temperate, and the soil of great fertility; but the people are rude, inhospitable, barbarous, and cruel, more given to hunting and idle play than to industry. Only three days’ sail from Spain, the Irish, he says, have many customs in common with the Spaniards.

Of Spain, the account given is particularly full, but by no means complimentary, and its people are contrasted—not to their advantage—with their neighbours the French. The extreme dryness of the climate is noticed, which tends to make the country less fertile than France. Irrigation, however, being practised on an extensive scale in many parts, tends to make up for the infrequency of rain, the conduits being often carried to great distances from the rivers. His description of the people is far from laudatory. ‘The Spaniard,’ he says, ‘is of a restless disposition, apt enough of understanding, but learning imperfectly or amiss, so that you shall find a learned Spaniard almost anywhere sooner than in Spain. Half-informed, he thinks himself brimful of information, and always pretends to more knowledge than he has in fact. He is much given to vast projects, never realised; and in conversation he delights in subtleties and sophistry. Teachers commonly prefer to speak Spanish rather than Latin in the schools and colleges of the country; but the people in general have little taste for letters, and produce few books themselves, mostly procuring those they want from France.’ The Spanish language, indeed, he speaks of as defective in many respects, and does not fail to remark on the number of Moorish words incorporated with it. The people, he says, ‘have many barbarous notions and usages,’ derived by implication from their old Moorish conquerors and fellow-denizens. ‘The women have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones. They besmirch their faces, too, with minium and ceruse—red and white lead—and walk about on clogs a foot or a foot and a half high, so that they seem to walk above rather than on the earth. The people are extremely temperate, and the women never drink wine. Spaniards, he concludes, are notably the most superstitious people in the world in their religious notions; but they are brave in the field, of signal endurance under privation and difficulty, and by their voyages of discovery have spread their name over the face of the globe.’

Of France, M. Villeneuve has less to say than of Spain; but what he tells us of the royal touch for the cure of scrofula is still interesting in the annals of superstition. ‘I have myself seen the king touching many labouring under this disease, but I did not see that they were cured.’

Of Germany, and he uses the title in a very comprehensive sense—he speaks at considerable length. Smarting under the rebuff he had received at the hands of the Swiss and German Reformers, he is nowise disposed to find the Teutons and their congeners or neighbours however designated, an interesting people, or their territories as in any way attractive. Referring to Tacitus’s account of Germany proper, as overgrown by vast forests, and defaced by frightful swamps, its climate he says is at once as insufferably hot in summer as it is bitterly cold in winter. ‘Hungary,’ he observes, ‘is commonly said to produce oxen, Bavaria swine, Franconia onions, turnips and liquorice, Swabia harlots, Bohemia heretics, Switzerland butchers, Westphalia cheats, and the whole country gluttons and drunkards. The Germans, however, are a religious people; not easily turned from opinions they have once espoused and not readily persuaded to concord in matters of schism, everyone valiantly and obstinately defending the heresy he has himself adopted;’ words in which we may presume Villanovanus sought to give ease to the pent-up displeasure he felt against his repudiators, the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg.

Of Italy and its people he has little to say; and that not good. The natives readily enough pretend to forgive injuries, but, occasion offering, none revenge themselves so savagely. They make use in their everyday talk of the most horrid oaths and imprecations. Holding all the rest of the world in contempt and calling them barbarians, they themselves have nevertheless been alternately the prey of France, of Spain, and of Germany.

In his survey of Babylonia, he refers to a certain abominable custom observed by young marriageable women, which is particularly mentioned by Herodotus and also by the writers of the Bible, when read by unsealed eyes, as obtaining among the Jews, and of the money, so objectionably earned in our estimation, being devoted to the service of the Temple.

But the most interesting to us perhaps of all the commentaries attached to the Ptolemy, inasmuch as it influenced the fate of Servetus on his trial at Geneva, is the one appended to the map of Palestine or the Holy Land. Demurring to much that is said in praise of Judæa in the Bible and by Josephus, as a country specially blessed in various ways, as being well-watered, fertile, &c., the commentator says, that in so far as climate is concerned, it is a temperate land, obnoxious to the extremes neither of heat nor of cold; a condition of things that may have led the Israelites or Hebrews to imagine that it must be the land that was promised to their forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a land metaphorically said to be flowing with milk and honey. ‘The Israelites,’ it is said in continuation, ‘lived at length under laws received from Moses, although they had gone on piously and prosperously enough through countless ages, before his day, without any written law, having had regard to the oracles of divine or natural truth alone, gifted as they were with aptitude and greatness of mind. Moses, however, that distinguished theologian, thinking that no state could exist without a written code of law and equity, gave them one reduced to ten principal heads, engraved on two tables of stone; with the addition of a great number of minor commandments for the regulation of their lives and dealings with one another. But any more particular notice of these, they being so numerous—great birds not sitting in little nests—must here be passed by. Know, however, most worthy reader, that it is mere boasting and untruth when so much of excellence is ascribed to this land; the experience of merchants and others, travellers who have visited it, proving it to be inhospitable, barren, and altogether without amenity. Wherefore you may say that the land was promised, indeed, but is of little promise when spoken of in everyday terms.’

The Ptolemy of Villanovanus was well received, and though costly, a second edition was by and by required. We find it much commended in subsequent reprints by their publishers; and no wonder, for the Ptolemy is really a sumptuous book, upon which a large sum of money must have been spent, the typography being excellent and the text profusely ornamented with woodcuts on the sides of the pages as well as at the heads and tails of the chapters.[38]

CHAPTER IX.
LYONS. DOCTOR SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER.

It was whilst engaged in the revision of such works as the Ptolemy and others on the natural sciences, anatomy, medicine, pharmacy, &c., in the service of the Trechsels, that Servetus may be said to have entered on the second, if it were not rather the third, stage of his mental development. The typographer’s reading-room had in truth proved the means of his continued education; each new volume he read and corrected being found a teacher not less influential than the Professor from his chair. The Convent school, Toulouse, and his engagement with Quintana had borne fruit of the kind we discover in the book on Trinitarian error; it was the reading-room of the printers of Lyons that brought him back from the empyrean of metaphysics to the earth, and put him in the way of becoming the geographer, astrologian, biblical critic, physiologist and physician we are made familiar with in his subsequent life and writings.

Among the learned works that flowed in a sort of ceaseless stream from the presses of the Trechsels during Servetus’s tenure of his office as reader with them, were several from the fertile pen of Doctor Symphorien Champier, or, when he latinised his name, Campeggius, a man of large and liberal culture, of a truly noble nature, an admirer of learning and a patron of the learned; possessed moreover of that restless vanity which made him feel it as much a matter of necessity to live in the eye of the world as to breathe; the effect of which was that he exerted the widest and most beneficent influence among his fellow men. Indefatigable in his proper calling, there was yet nothing which interested the citizens of Lyons that did not interest him. Fearless in bringing help on the battle-field, to which he accompanied his chief the Duke of Lorraine, he was no less ready to brave pestilence in the city, and was as often to be seen in the hovels of the poor as in the palaces of the great and wealthy—inopibus et infortunatis æque indiscriminatimque succurris opitularisve, says his biographer—a true physician, a great and good man.[39]

Among Champier’s numerous works published about this time, we note the Pentapharmacum Gallicum (Lyons, 1534), which Servetus we believe read and corrected for press, the gist of the work being to show that each country produces the medicines best adapted to cure the diseases of its inhabitants, and that to them exotics are for the most part not only useless, but injurious; an assumption in which he differs notably from present experience and the great writer, his countryman, who came after him, and said that ‘God had inflicted fever on Europe, but put its remedy in America.’ Correcting the proofs of Champier’s five-fold French Pharmacopœia, Servetus must have introduced himself to, or become acquainted with, the author; and if we may credit Pastor Henry Tollin, who will have everyone as truly interested in Servetus as himself, Champier was so much taken by the accomplishments of the poor scholar as even to make a home for him in Lyons. Be this as it may, certain it seems that contact with Champier was that which led Servetus to study medicine, of which he had not thought until now, for it was a science much looked down on by Spaniards in general, its practice being mostly in the hands of Jews and Moors, whom to contemn, where not to oppress, was a religion with all who boasted of their blue blood.

Another of Champier’s books printed by the Trechsels, which we need not doubt Servetus had also read and put to use, was the ‘Hortus Gallicus’ (Lyons 1533). But more influential on him still, though printed in another establishment (that of Seb. Gryphius) during the time he lived in Lyons, was the great Lyonnese Doctor’s Cribratio Medicamentorum, with the Medulla Philosophle—the Marrow of Philosophy—appended. In his chapter on the Vital, Animal, and Natural Spirits (p. 137), Champier speaks of ‘spirit as a subtle, aerial, translucid substance produced of the finest part of the blood, and carried by it from the heart, as principal vital organ, to all parts of the body. Spoken of as three,’ he continues, ‘there are in truth but two kinds of spirit, the vital and the animal.’ The sameness of this to what we shall find in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ will be obvious to all. It strikes us in fact that Villanovanus’s first medical production—the Treatise on Syrups—was wholly inspired by this Marrow of Philosophy of Champier, in which we discover much upon digestion and concoction, the maturation and evacuation of the humours, etc., precisely as in the treatise ‘De Syrupis.’

Nor did Champier’s influence on our scholar end here. One of the Doctor’s treatises is entitled, ‘Prognosticon perpetuum Astrologorum, Medicorum et Prophetarum—The guide of the Astrologer, Physician and Prophet in their prognostications or forecasts.’ Like so many in his age, Champier was a devoted astrologer; and it was he we may conclude who made Servetus one too. Champier having been attacked on the score of his astrology by Leonhard Fuchs, Professor of Medicine in Heidelberg,[40] Michael Villanovanus, as grateful pupil, took up the pen in defence of his master, and replied by a pamphlet entitled, ‘Defence of Symphorien Champier, addressed to Leonhard Fuchs,[41] and an Apologetic Dissertation on Astrology.’[42] Villanovanus, it seems, would not neglect what he must have thought a favourable opportunity of showing himself to the world in company with so distinguished an individual as the great Physician of Lyons, to whom he owns himself much indebted—cui multum debeo, and ventilating a subject that interested him, like so many of his age, only in a less degree than theology itself.

CHAPTER X.

RETURN TO PARIS. STUDIES THERE. JO. WINTER OF ANDERNACH; ANDREA VESALIUS. DEGREES OF M.A. AND M.D. LECTURES ON GEOGRAPHY AND ASTROLOGY.

Villeneuve, we must presume, had reached Lyons poor enough in pocket if rich in lore; but so diligently had he laboured and so liberally had he been paid by the princely publishers of the day, that within two years he found himself in funds sufficient to authorise a return to Paris with a view to the study of Medicine, which he had now resolved to make his profession for life. The rebuff he had had from Œcolampadius, Bucer, and the rest, had probably sickened him for a while with theology and scholasticism, from which, however, we may presume he had only been diverted by his failure to make an immediate impression on the Reformers and the necessity of providing for his daily wants. But ‘the fresh fields and pastures new’ brought into sight by the study of Ptolemy, and the healthy influence of Champier, the physician and naturalist, gave another turn to his mind, and with the money he had earned in his purse, but still comporting himself as the poor scholar, he entered first the College of Calvi, and then that of the Lombards. To these as a subject of the Holy Roman Empire he probably had ready access, and in their quiet shades devoted himself to the new course of study he had determined to pursue.

His larger experience and intercourse with Champier must have shown Servetus that medicine was a more assured means of earning a subsistence than theology, and opened up a far wider field to his ambition than continued service with the typographers. Without utterly neglecting older studies, therefore, he now gave his chief attention to the great and useful art and science of medicine; and we shall find as we proceed that the lessons of such teachers as Joannes Guinterus (Jo. Winter of Andernach), Jacobus Sylvius (J. du Bois), Joannes Fernelius, and others of name and fame in their day, found congenial soil in the receptive mind of the student.

Servetus, indeed, would seem immediately to have made his presence felt in the medical school of Paris; he was at once more than a listener to the prelections of its professors. Associated with no less distinguished an individual than Andrea Vesalius, he was one of Winter of Andernach’s two prosectors, and prepared the subject for each day’s demonstration.

And let not the conjunction of talent that meets us here be overlooked. Vesalius, repudiating the authority of Galen, became the restorer—the Creator of Modern Anatomy. Servetus, breaking with scholasticism in theology, and freeing himself from the shackles of Greeks and Arabians in practical medicine, inaugurated Rational Physiology when he proclaimed the course of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart through the lungs. Working together as friends and fellow students for the Professor of Anatomy, Vesalius and Servetus, through diversity of mental constitution, yet saw things diversely. Vesalius, the observer, abiding by the concrete, described with rare felicity and truthfulness what he witnessed; Servetus, gifted with genius, aspiring to the ideal and inferring consequences, deduced the pulmonary circulation from the structure of the heart and lungs!

Nor were the two men associates only in their studies; they were fellows also in the untoward fate that befel them both in after life; for both may be said to have fallen victims to their zeal. Somewhat precipitate, we may presume, in his eagerness for information, the heart of a young nobleman who had died under his care and whose body Vesalius was inspecting, was either seen to palpitate, or was thought to have palpitated, when touched by the knife of the anatomist. Accused forthwith of murder, it was only by the interference of Philip II. of Spain, whose physician Vesalius was, that a formal trial for manslaughter was commuted for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with confession and absolution at the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre. The penance was undergone, but the pilgrim, homeward bound, suffered shipwreck on the island of Crete, and perished miserably there. Servetus again, as we shall see, in his eagerness to proclaim what he believed to be the truth, and given no chance for his life, had to abide the still more cruel death of the faggot and stake.

Joannes Guinterus, it is interesting to know, bears honourable testimony to the merits of his two assistants. In the preface to his ‘Anatomical Institutions’ he informs us that ‘he had been most effectually aided in the preparation of the work, first by Andrea Vesalius, a young man, by Hercules! singularly proficient in anatomy; and after him by Michael Villanovanus, distinguished by his literary acquirements of every kind, and scarcely second to any in his knowledge of Galenical doctrine. Under the supervision and with the aid of these two,’ he continues, ‘I have myself examined in the Subject and have shown to the students the whole of the muscles, veins, arteries, and nerves, both of the extremities and internal parts of the body.’[43] From this we learn whence Servetus had the anatomical knowledge that enabled him as inductive reasoner—true forerunner here of our own immortal Harvey—to proclaim the pulmonary circulation.

The practice of dissecting the human subject had therefore, by this time, extended to France—the bodies of one or more malefactors being now publicly anatomised in the course of each winter session.[44] Had we no other evidence of the genius with which Michael Servetus was endowed, beyond the use he made of what he saw in these anatomical demonstrations, we should still feel entitled to speak of him as the most far-sighted physiologist of his age; for he alone of all his contemporaries, though fettered by the prevalent metaphysical theories of life, the soul and the spirits, from which we ourselves have not yet escaped, not only divined, but positively proclaimed the passage of the blood, by way of the lungs, from the right to the left side of the heart, and thence—but stopping short of the whole truth, first proclaimed by Harvey—from the left ventricle of the heart to the body at large. But the book in which his important Induction is contained, though printed in his lifetime, was never published. Seen by none but a few theologians, who took no note of its physiological contents, it remained unknown to the world for nearly a century and a half, after its author had fallen a victim to the hate of Calvin and the intolerance of his age.

With the stimulus of necessity upon him, for he was poor, and the excitement of vanity, with which he was largely endowed, as he could not live on the learning he imbibed from his teachers, Servetus by-and-by appeared before the world as a teacher in his turn. Having by diligence and superior natural capacity, in a singularly short space of time, achieved the degrees of M.A. and M.D., which were required before he could present himself either as Professor or Physician within the domain of the University of Paris, Servetus now came forward as a Lecturer on the Geography of Ptolemy and the science of Astrology—a term which then included the true doctrine of the heavenly bodies as well as the false doctrine of their presumed influence on the life of man and the current of events in the world. In this bold step we have another glimpse of the self-reliant, and it may be, somewhat presumptuous, character of the man; for even as the emancipated novice of the monk’s school and Saragossan professors, when little more than of age, showed himself as Theologian in the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ so did the newly becapped Magister Artium now come forward as Lecturer on Geography and Astrology, and the scarce fledged doctor in physic, as a teacher of his fellows and the world at large, in the art and mystery of treating Disease.

The course of Lectures on Geography and Astrology was a happy thought, and proved highly successful. It was delivered to a large and distinguished audience, and besides supplying the professor with funds for all his wants, became a means of introducing him to friends, influential for good on his future life. Amongst the number of his auditors there was a young ecclesiastic, a scholar and man of talent, Pierre Paumier, who after employment in various offices of trust by his king, Francis the First, was transferred to a position of no less dignity and emolument than that of Archbishop of Vienne in Dauphiny.

Under the auspices of the Archbishop, and as we believe on his invitation, it was that Servetus found a final resting place by his side. Fresh from editing Ptolemy, with the old stores of classic lore he had at command, and of anecdote and general information he had amassed in reading up for his editorial duties, aided by the natural fluency with which we venture to credit him, it is easy to imagine how interesting these Lectures must have been in days when the world was eager for information on the discoveries of the great voyagers and travellers of the age, and when books were still both scarce and costly, and little read by the many.

But Servetus was a Physician as well as Geographer and Astrologer, and not the man to hide any light he had under a bushel. He must appear in connection with his profession, as well as in the accessory field of general knowledge, by writing a book upon some properly medical subject, a business which he set about forthwith under the immediate inspiration of all he had learned from Dr. Champier of Lyons, as well as his professors of Paris.

CHAPTER XI.

THE TREATISE ON SYRUPS AND THEIR USE IN MEDICINE.[45]

The medical world in the early part of the sixteenth century was divided into two great hostile camps, respectively designated Galenists, or followers of the Greeks, and Averrhoists, or disciples of the Arabians; the former swearing by Hippocrates and Galen, the latter by Averrhoes and Avicenna. Servetus’s initiator into matters medical, Champier, was a fervent admirer of the Greeks; and his pupil, led by his classical training as well as his master’s example, naturally attached himself to the same school. Here, nevertheless, as ever, he showed the independence of his nature by having open eyes for any truth the Arabian writers might present; so that we find nothing of servility or one-sidedness in what he has to say.

The treatise in which Villanovanus came before the public in his new capacity of physician was on the practical use of the class of medicines known in those days by the title of Syrups—sweetened decoctions or infusions of different kinds, still in vogue among the French under the name of Tisanes. These syrups appear to have been one of the bones of contention between the two parties, though neither was perfectly agreed in itself as to the indications for their use or of the principles on which they were to be prescribed. This question does not interest us here, and so we leave it; but we turn to the work of Michael Villanovanus for intimations in its style of the intellectual and moral nature of its author.

In his address to the reader he says, ‘I should not have proposed, most learned reader, to take on my weak shoulders this weighty and so much disputed province of the healing art, had I not felt me forced, against my will as it were, to lend my aid in furthering medical studies by a fair defence of Galenical doctrine, and more especially still by my love of truth.... I think it will be found that I have conciliated Galen so far with my own views as to dispel any doubts I may have had of a favourable award, if I have only an equitable judge in my reader. Of this, at all events, I feel well assured that no studious person who carefully weighs what is here set forth will repent him of his reading.’ This is not amiss from a Doctor of a year’s standing! But it is in his Preface to the work that Michael Villanovanus, as we apprehend him, comes still more particularly before us. Aware, as he says, of the fate that so often befals the meddler in a quarrel not his own, and displaying a commendable amount of caution, not without a spice of mock modesty, our author is here considerate enough to tell us that ‘he does not intend to offer himself as censor in the controversy, between the Galenists and Averrhoists, and by finding something to object to in the conclusions of each, to have them both fall foul of him as an enemy;’ after which he proceeds, characteristically still, to say, ‘but that I may not withhold from others that which I possess myself and gratefully acknowledge, which may be of use to my fellow men, I throw aside fear and proclaim what I believe to be the truth.’

The ‘Syruporum Universa Ratio,’ or general Rationale of Syrups, is in truth a very learned little book, extremely well written; much of it, as becomes the young practitioner, having reference to the writings of predecessors of the highest authority in medical science. Hippocrates and Galen, above all others, are freely quoted, and their views discussed, for Servetus was ‘nothing if not critical,’ and a variorum reading or two to show his scholarship is proposed. But he also refers to Avicenna, not thinking it amiss to learn of the enemy, and to Paul of Aegina, Monardus and others, by which he proclaims the extent of his reading, and his readiness to imbibe knowledge at every source.

I looked with interest for some physiological hint or statement in this book, on Syrups or Diet drinks, that might have heralded the brilliant exposition contained in the latest product of his genius—the Christianismi Restitutio or Restoration of Christianity—concerning the way in which the blood from the right reaches the left ventricle of the heart through the lungs, but in vain. We must presume nevertheless that he was already possessed of the anatomical facts on which his later induction is founded. The only physiological reference I discovered in the book on Syrups was to the Mesentery as giving origin to the veins—a step in advance of his predecessors, with whom the liver was the source as it was also the laboratory of the blood, as the veins were the channels for its distribution to the body.

It is not uninteresting, however, to observe the same tendency towards unity or oneness here, in the domain of positive knowledge, which we discover pervading Servetus’s other works that lose themselves in the realm of metaphysical abstraction. He will not acknowledge two or any greater number of concoctions or digestions, whether in health or disease, such as were generally admitted in his day. The processes that take place in disease he declares to be of the same nature, though they are perverted, as those that occur in the healthy body. Diseases are therefore nothing more than perversions of natural functions, not new entities introduced into the body; a conclusion which, on physiological grounds, he sums up in these words: ‘The rationale in the maturation of disease and in the digestion of the food is one and the same.’[46]

CHAPTER XII.

THE MEDICAL FACULTY OF PARIS SUE VILLANOVANUS FOR LECTURING ON JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY.

Servetus’s fate on starting in life was opposition; and how should it have been otherwise?—he found himself through superior endowment and higher culture antagonistic to almost all he saw around him in the world. We have already had him met as a trespasser on their domain by the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg, and we have now to find him looked on as an intruder by the Medical Faculty of Paris. The lecturer on Geography and Astrology had attracted a large amount of public attention, and the author of the book on Syrups began to get into vogue as a practitioner of medicine. The book had in fact been as well received as the lectures; it was extensively read, much commended at the time, and reprinted oftener than once in after years. No wonder, therefore, that Michel Villeneuve M.D. had now as many eyes upon him in Paris as Michael Servetus had had in other days in Switzerland. Before he could well look about him, the whole faculty of Physicians and the heads of the University of Paris were in array against him.

It seems that he had gone out of his way in his lectures to say something disrespectful of the doctors, his contemporaries, accusing them of ignorance of many things necessary to the successful practice of their profession, particularly of Astronomy, or more properly Astrology, a science in which Villeneuve plumed himself as being a master. The doctors naturally enough complained of such impropriety, and had him cited before their council. There he was told that something more of respectful bearing was due from him to men who had been his masters; and above all that he was transgressing the boundaries of true science and common sense in making so much of Astrology. The Dean of the Faculty is even said to have had him several times privately before him, and warned him of the difficulties he would inevitably fall into, if he continued casting nativities and prescribing for the ailments of his patients from the aspects of the stars; for this, it appears, was the principal element in his medical practice. Servetus, unhappily for himself, was not one of those who could take even friendly advice in good part. As credulous as he was sceptical, and believing implicitly in himself and in stellar influences, he not only made no submission, but said that his ill-wishers should rue their opposition.

The doctors on their part not only gave no heed to his threats, but publicly denounced him from their chairs as an impostor and wind-bag; with the consequence of arousing him to self-defence, and with his ready pen setting him to work upon a pamphlet, in which he did not fail to lay bare some of the sore places in the persons of his adversaries, characterising them as mannerless and unlettered, and even holding them up in their ignorance as very pests of society. Once in the hands of the printer, Villeneuve’s purpose to expose his detractors through the dreaded press became known; and such alarm does his meditated attack appear to have excited that the Faculty of Physicians, calling the Senate of the University to their side, petitioned the Parliament of Paris to forbid the publication of the pamphlet, as well as to interdict its author from continuing to lecture on Astrology, which they now characterised as Divination.

The Parliament, with becoming judicial impartiality, would take no step in the matter until they had heard Villeneuve in his defence and had something tangible, such as the pamphlet which it was sought to suppress, before them. Nothing more was done, consequently, than the issuing of a summons to Villeneuve to appear at the bar of the house on a certain day and give an account of himself. This gave him all he required: time to have his pamphlet printed. Keeping the compositors at work, with a promise of higher pay if they used despatch, it was not only ready before the day of citation came round, but had been distributed gratis in numbers to the public as well as to the members of the medical profession. They reckoned without their host who thought that Michel Villeneuve was to be cowed by opposition, however imposingly headed.

The doctors were naturally excessively wroth with this daring move on the part of the man they desired to crush. He had not awaited the decision of the Parliament; and neither now did they pause; for believing they had a hold upon him on the score of heresy, implied in the practice of judicial astrology or divination, they had him summoned before the Inquisitor of the king as an enemy to the Church, and contemner of its statutes. There was no regularly established Inquisition at this time in France; but papal inquisitors, often Italians by birth, were commonly enough found accredited by the Holy See, with the sanction of the Sovereign, to the large towns of the country. There they held courts before which cases of imputed heresy were tried and adjudged—the decisions come to, however, being always made subject to revision by the civil tribunals of the realm. Nay, there was a right of demurrage to the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, at the option of the party incriminated, were he minded to be tried by the ordinary civil, rather than the extraordinary ecclesiastical, court.

We might have imagined that Michael Servetus, with the experience he had had of ecclesiastical incapacity to hear reason and ‘true judgment give,’ as he interpreted it, would have paused before venturing to appear before the inquisitor of the king; but so safe must Michel Villeneuve have felt against a charge of heresy at this time, and so secure in his new designation, that he did not hesitate to obey the summons; although we learn that had he been so minded, he might as a member of the Faculty of Physicians have even disregarded it entirely. He appeared accordingly at the proper moment; and so well did he play his part, so thoroughly did he satisfy the inquisitor of the king that he was a good Christian, that he left the court with flying colours, absolved of all suspicion of heresy, to the utter discomfiture of his accusers, who had now nothing for it but patiently to wait the award of the Parliament.

Before this tribunal, acting it would seem as a court of justice, a suit was regularly instituted, with the Rector of the University of Paris and the Dean and Faculty of Physic of the same as pursuers, on the one part, and Michael Villanovanus as defendant, on the other. For the University and Faculty, it was alleged that judicial astrology, otherwise to be styled divination, is forbidden by various statutes, as well canonical and divine as civil, the penalty for practising the same being death by fire, and that the defendant, a man of learning, and so incapacitated from pleading ignorance of these statutes, had notoriously lectured both in public and private on certain books of divination, among others, on the works entitled ‘De Aleabiticis’ and ‘De Divificationibus,’ both of which are full of divination.

It was alleged further, that he had been known to make forecasts for various persons in respect of their fortunes from their nativities, on the assumption that according to the day and the hour of a man’s birth, and the aspect of the heavens at the time, would fortune of a favourable or adverse kind befal him; all of which by the Faculty of Theology is held highly reprehensible. That for his lectures and lessons, moreover, he takes money and attracts numerous auditors, who, seduced by the pleasantness of the poison he sells, have been debauched and led to forsake the true philosophy of Pico de Mirandola, who declares divination to be the most pestilent of frauds, degrading philosophy, invalidating religion, strengthening superstition, corrupting morals, and making men miserable slaves instead of free men.

Not stopping short at such public and private misdeeds, continue the pursuers, he has written and had printed a certain apology or defence of divination,[47] with his name attached, which is of a highly objectionable character in every respect; the Theological Faculty declaring in addition that the concluding sentence of this apology has an extremely suspicious appearance, couched as it is in these words: ‘On the following night Mars is eclipsed by the moon, near the star called the King, in the constellation of Leo; whence I predict that in the course of this year the hearts of the Lions, i.e. the princes, will be greatly moved; that with Mars in the ascendant war will prevail, and much havoc be done by fire and sword; that the Church will suffer tribulation, several princes die, and pestilence and other evils abound. To languish, to mourn, to die—all of good or ill that comes to man proceeds from heaven.’

The petition of the pursuers on the above showing therefore is, that the defendant, Villanovanus, be interdicted for the future from professing and practising judicial astrology, whether in public or private; that he be forbidden further to circulate his pamphlet against the Faculty, and commanded to call in all unsold copies; that for what has passed he own himself to blame, and be enjoined for the future to bear himself respectfully towards the Faculty of Physic, to which he belongs.

In his address to the court on behalf of his client, Villanovanus’s counsel opined that the Faculty of Physic had descended somewhat from the dignity that became so great a body in taking steps against one, a stranger, who had been attracted to Paris by the science that distinguished it, of which he had heard so much. The cause of the hostility of the Faculty against his client, he said, was owing to his having insisted on the necessity of a knowledge of astronomy to the Physician. This had been turned into a knowledge of judicial astrology by his enemies; but there were many of his hearers who were ready to testify that he had never even mentioned judicial astrology. As to the paragraph about the Lions, he had only given it as illustrating the rules of astrological science, and the knowledge he has of the possible influence of the stars; but he would by no means insist that events of the kind named must happen as matter of necessity. In all this, however, he is ready to submit himself to the judgment of the court, and on his words being pronounced objectionable, he is willing to be set right. With regard to what he says in his apology about physicians being the plagues of society, he of course only aims at the ignorant and unskilful among them; the saying, indeed, is none of his, but Galen’s, who speaks of the ignorant practitioners of medicine of his day in precisely the same words.

The judgment of the court is nearly in the terms of the counsel’s address for the prosecution. His statements appear to have been taken as trustworthy without further evidence adduced. Villanovanus is ordered to call in his pamphlet and deposit the copies with the proper officer of the court; to pay all honour and respect to the Faculty of Physic in its collective and individual capacity, saying and writing nothing unbecoming of it, but conducting himself at all times peacefully and reverently towards its members; the doctors, on their part, being enjoined to treat Villanovanus gently and amiably, as parents treat their children. Villanovanus is then expressly inhibited and forbidden to appear in public, or in any other way, as a professor or practitioner of judicial astrology, otherwise called divination; he is to confine himself in his discussions of astrological subjects to the influence of the heavenly bodies on the course of the seasons and other natural phenomena, and not to meddle with questions or judgments of stellar influences on individuals or events, under pain of being deprived of the privileges he enjoys as a graduate of the University of Paris.

Done this 18th of March, 1538.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHARLIEU—ATTAINMENT OF HIS THIRTIETH YEAR—HIS VIEWS OF BAPTISM.

This decree and interdict of the Parliament of Paris could not have been satisfactory to Servetus. We need not question his belief in the reality of judicial astrology, nor doubt of the application of its presumed principles having been found profitable by him; for a longing to pry into futurity is among the infirmities of human nature, and a belief in the influence of the stars on the fortunes of men was all but universal in the age of Servetus. Nor is it even now entirely extinct in the world; for the ‘Vox Stellarum’ is still regularly printed in England, and finds a sale by thousands every year among the superstitious and the ill-educated of our population. Hardly, moreover, does a child come into the world among us now without a great fuss being made as to the precise moment of the birth; though the particulars obtained may never be thought of afterwards, nor the end for which they were sought be even surmised. But when we look on the cornelian and clay cylinders dug up in such numbers from the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, engraved with the accredited figures of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the emblematical representations of the constellations, such as Cassiopæia, Hercules Ingeniculus, Ursa Major, Leo, Auriga, Cepheus, and others, still depicted on our celestial globes, we learn how old was the belief that every man and woman who came into the world was influenced in after life by the star under which he or she was born.[48]

Villeneuve might possibly have continued lecturing on astrology, composing horoscopes, and casting nativities, as others did in his day, had he but had the prudence to control his tongue, and not hold up his brethren of the Faculty of Physic to contempt by proclaiming their ignorance of a science in which he himself excelled and held necessary to treat disease in the most effectual manner; but he had been indiscreet, and they had won the day. He could no longer go on making forecasts for a credulous public from the aspect of the heavens at the moment of their birth, and he must show himself forward to call in the unsold copies of his pamphlet which had been found so offensive, perhaps because so well directed and so true. It would have interested us in the present day to have known precisely wherein the sting of this apology lay; but like others among the host of ephemeral publications, hurriedly produced to serve a purpose of the hour, it has perished. There were few collectors of ballads, broadsides, and tracts, three hundred and fifty years ago; and all the searches for a copy of the philippic against the Parisian Faculty have proved in vain.[49]

From the estimate we are led to form of the self-sufficing and defiant character of Michael Servetus, as displayed in his after life, we are disposed to wonder that he did not continue to dispute the field of Paris with his opponents. He had published his clever and scholarly treatise on Syrups, and through it achieved a title to consideration as a learned practitioner of medicine in the regular way. Such a man as he would soon have lived down the stigma his fellows had fastened upon him as a fortune-teller from the stars, and he must by and by have taken his place in the front rank of his profession. But the physician comes slowly into practice when public confidence is courted through the gate of science. Horoscope-making was probably the main source of Villeneuve’s income; and this forbidden, and the golden stream it fed, arrested, the cold shoulder shown him by his professional brethren, and the averted looks of the public at the man condemned by the Parliament of Paris,—all was against him; his malignant star had culminated, and he seems to have thought it best to yield to fate, and give way.

It must have been immediately after the conclusion of the suit against him that Servetus left Paris; for we have news of him in the course of the same year (1538) as a practitioner of medicine in the town of Charlieu, distant about twelve French miles from the city of Lyons. He may have been led to this retreat through knowledge gained in the course of his former residence in Lyons; but he did not continue long there—certainly for not more than a year and a half, or so. Could we trust the report of one who speaks of him as ‘a most arrogant and insolent person,’ he must have embroiled himself with some of the more influential people of Charlieu, who, as said, made his position so uncomfortable that he was forced to quit and go farther afield.[50] But Villeneuve had earned for himself an ill name by his dispute with the University and Medical Faculty of Paris; and coming from the quarter it does, we give no credit to the tale, led as we are by what we know to find a much better reason for the remove than any fresh personal dispute, though there does seem to have been something of the kind complicating matters, as well as certain ‘love passages,’ which, as they came to nothing, may have rendered longer residence in the place unpleasant.

The residence of Villeneuve in Charlieu, however, is not without interest, as giving us a further insight into the character and predominant pious nature of the man. In the course of the year 1539, which he passed at Charlieu, Michael Servetus attained the thirtieth year of his age, the year according to his religious tenets in which only baptism could be rightly received. ‘He who would follow the example of Christ,’ says he in his latest work, ‘ought now to betake him to this Laver of Regeneration—Lavacrum Regenerationis;’ and from the particular account he gives of the manner in which they who think with him on the subject of baptism perform the rite, we can scarcely doubt of his having found occasion to have himself privately baptized by some Anabaptist acquaintance he had made. Servetus was unquestionably a man of so pious a nature, so sincere a believer in the divinity of Christ, according to his way of interpreting it, and so firmly persuaded that the closest possible imitation of him was necessary to salvation, that we may feel assured he found means to have a rite he held so indispensable properly performed at the proper moment. It must have been in the consciousness of having himself done what he thought right in this particular, that we find him by and by urgently exhorting Calvin, with whom he had entered into correspondence, and probably knew to be of his own age, to have himself baptized anew. ‘Christ,’ he says, ‘as an infant, was circumcised, but not baptized; and this is a great mystery; in his thirtieth year, however, he received baptism; thereby setting us the example, and teaching us that before this age no one is a fit recipient of the rite that gives the kingdom of heaven to man. It were fit and proper in you, therefore, would you show true faith in Christ, to submit yourself to baptism, and so receive the gift of the Holy Spirit promised through this means.’ (Epist. xv. ad Jo. Calvinum, Christ. Restit., p. 615.)

CHAPTER XIV.

SETTLEMENT AT VIENNE UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP—RENEWAL OF INTERCOURSE WITH THE PUBLISHERS OF LYONS—SECOND EDITION OF PTOLEMY.

It was while resident at Charlieu that Villeneuve again met with Pierre Paumier, now Archbishop of Vienne, Dauphiny, whom he had known in Paris, who indeed had been among the number of his auditors when he lectured on geography and the science of the stars. Paumier had the reputation, well deserved as it appears, of being a lover of learning for its own sake, and fond of the society of men learned like himself. Thinking, we may presume, that one with the accomplishments of his old professor would be an addition to the society of the archiepiscopal city of Vienne, when he heard of Villeneuve’s presence in Charlieu as a practising physician, he sought him out, and pressed him to quit the narrower for the wider field. This, under such auspices, we can well imagine Doctor Villeneuve was nowise loth to do; so that we next hear of him installed at Vienne, with apartments found him in the precincts of the Palace, and so under the immediate patronage of the Archbishop.

Not overburthened with professional work at first, Villeneuve appears to have renewed, if he had not kept up, his connection with the publishers of Lyons; and, as a means of income, continued his literary labours in various directions for more than one of the fraternity. Among other works, the edition of ‘Ptolemy’ he had supervised for the Trechsels, when in their service in 1535, being exhausted, a second was required; and their old editor having already proved himself abundantly competent, overtures were made to him to undertake the work anew. A proposal of the kind we need not doubt was gladly received, and the Trechsels having set up a branch establishment at Vienne, and the Archbishop consenting to accept the dedication of the new ‘Ptolemy,’ our editor had an opportunity of saying something pleasant to his patron, and of showing himself advantageously to the public around him in connection with a handsome volume from a press of their own city. The work accordingly was entered on with alacrity; and as the editor was not only countenanced, but assisted by the Archbishop, himself no mean geographer, the new edition made its appearance in the course of 1541, amended and improved.[51]

If the first ‘Ptolemy’ of Michael Villanovanus had been seen as an improvement on its predecessors, his second was a marked advance upon it, and is interesting to us on many accounts. Though much lauded and commercially successful, the first edition, in a literary point of view, was still far from what it was capable of being made. The ornamentation of the volume, though profuse, was not highly artistic, and the wood-cuts had already done duty in various other publishing ventures. There was ample room for improvement both in the direction of greater accuracy of text and of better taste. In the re-issue, consequently, we find various alterations, and two or three omissions that are highly significant. It is printed on better paper, too, and new maps are added; the coarse wood-cuts are left out, and the text in various parts is amended. Altogether the volume is a very handsome one, and was obviously produced with every care to secure accuracy and elegance.

In his Dedication to the Archbishop, we have an assurance that life among the polished circles of Vienne had already had a mollifying influence on the hot-headed Michel Villeneuve of Parisian days. The polite terms in which, beside the Archbishop, all and sundry of mark and name in the city are spoken of, are particularly notable. We know how little there was of compliment in the words with which he took leave of his Swiss opponents, and imagine the sting there must be in the paper with which he bade the Parisian Faculty farewell. But now, beneath the wing of the great church dignitary, and referring to the time when as professor of geography and astrology he had had him among the number of his auditors, Villanovanus tells us that he is especially encouraged in his purpose to produce a more correct edition of the great geographer’s work, by the permission he has received to dedicate it to his patron, as well as by the assistance he has had from him in the amendment of numerous faulty passages.

‘For you,’ continues our Editor, addressing the Archbishop, ‘are the one among our church dignitaries I have known who, loving letters and favouring learned men, have given particular attention to geographical science. I am also incited to my work by the many favours I have received at your hand. Under what patronage but yours, indeed, could this work, amended, and printed at Vienne, appear, student as you are of ‘Ptolemy,’ and head of our Viennese society? Nor, sooth to say, will our ‘Ptolemy’ want a welcome from others about us interested in geography; among the foremost of whom I may name your relation John Paumier, prior of St. Marcel, and Claude de Rochefort, your vicar, both of them highly accomplished men, commended of all, and to whom I may say that I myself owe as much in my sphere as students of geography owe to ‘Ptolemy.’ I must do no more than mention Joannes Albus, prior of St. Peter and St. Simeon; for I am forbidden to speak of his virtues. Neither must I make other than a passing allusion to the noble triad, your officials; for words would fail me to speak worthily of their great qualities; and of Doctor John Perell, your physician, my old fellow-student in Paris, so learned in philosophy and skilled in the languages—I can only say that one more apt than I were required fitly to speak his praise.’

From this we learn that Michael Villanovanus, all in laying on flattery somewhat thickly, could still show himself the grateful man; as ready to acknowledge kindness as we have known him apt to take fire at opposition and ready to resent what he held to be unworthy usage. But the matter is even more interesting to us, as giving us to know the kind of society Servetus frequented in Vienne, and the consequent esteem in which he must have been held. The ‘noble triad’ referred to, we imagine, may have consisted of M. Maugiron, the Lieutenant-General of Dauphiny; M. de la Cour, the Vibailly; and M. Arzelier, the Vicar-General.

Among the alterations and omissions to be observed in the new edition of the ‘Ptolemy,’ the most notable occur under the heads of Germany, France, and Judæa. The edition of 1535 was set about and produced shortly after he had been so unhandsomely received, as he thought, by the Swiss and German Reformers; and we are therefore sorry, though not surprised, to find that disappointment and pique had left him with little inclination to say much in praise either of themselves or their respective countries. Hence the generally evil report he makes of Germany, and the notice of Switzerland as remarkable for nothing but the production of butchers! All this is either suppressed or toned down in the edition of 1541. The editor had had time for reflection; and under the soothing influences of the archiepiscopal city and professional success, he now makes a more favourable report of the countries and peoples he had formerly gone out of his way to decry and defame. Instead of the forest-encumbered and swampy land with its inclement sky of the former edition, Germany is now a regio amœna, with a cœlum satis clemens—a pleasant country with quite a temperate climate, and all the damaging statements in regard to its several divisions and their peoples are omitted.

The graphic account we had formerly of the boastful, ignorant, and superstitious people of Spain is also left out in the reprint; but we have an added notice of the people of France which shows us how little nations change in the course of three hundred and fifty years. ‘Not only in the cities and country places,’ says our editor, ‘but even in single families, every Frenchman seems to think he has a right to rule over everybody else. The assertion of individual superiority is so universal that every one among them would have every one else to do his bidding, he himself feeling bound to do the bidding of none.’

The Church and her favoured sons, the hierarchs thereof, having still thriven in the shadow of the throne, as Villeneuve was now living amid the clerical society of an archiepiscopal city, it was thought that the few words in the former edition, which seemed to question the efficacy of the ‘Royal Touch’ in curing scrofula, would be out of place. They are, therefore, now found modified. For the ‘I did not see that any were cured,’ we find ‘I have heard say that many were cured!’ The new edition, moreover, being dedicated to the Archbishop of Vienne, it was felt that any word in dispraise of the Holy Land would seem disrespectful and improper. All that is said in connection with the map of Palestine contradictory to the Bible account of Judæa as a land flowing with milk and honey, or as of signal beauty and fertility, is accordingly entirely expunged from the new impression.

These changes have been said to be due to warnings given by friends to Servetus, on the presumption, probably, that he could hardly have been living on terms of intimacy with many persons of note, both lay and clerical, without betraying something of the sceptical element that distinguished him at the outset of his career, and that got the mastery of him with such disastrous consequences at last. But we have no positive intimation that Servetus ever failed to keep his counsel, or that he was known to a soul in Vienne, save as M. Michel Villeneuve, the physician. Calvin certainly knew him by no other name in Paris when they met there in 1534, a date at which we have surmised he had not yet read the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ and so escaped having his suspicions aroused through the sameness of the views propounded in that work, and those expressed by his acquaintance, Villeneuve, that he had its author, Michael Serveto, alias Revés, bodily before him.

That this was really the case is confirmed by the statement which he makes on his trial at Vienne, to the effect, that he had only been challenged by Calvin in the course of their correspondence, begun as many as fourteen years after the publication of his first book, with being no other than Servetus. Having read the ‘De Erroribus’ subsequently, Calvin did not fail to discover Michael Serveto under the cloak of Michael Villanovanus, his correspondent of Vienne, and may consequently, some time after the year 1546, have written to Cardinal Tournon, as said by Bolsec,[52] or hinted to a friend in Lyons, that they had an egregious heretic, the writer of the work on Trinitarian Error, living among them under an assumed name. But of so much as this we have no reliable assurance, and even if we had, it could have no reference to the year 1541, the date of publication of the second edition of Villanovanus’s ‘Ptolemy.’[53]

CHAPTER XV.

EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI’S LATIN BIBLE, WITH COMMENTARY.

Servetus must have got through a very considerable amount of literary work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the second ‘Ptolemy’ seen the light, than we find another handsome volume in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.[54]

Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus’s mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a ‘book fallen down from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.’ But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived.

In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor, Villanovanus means to be no mere follower in the beaten track, but to take an independent course of his own. ‘They,’ he says, ‘who are ignorant of the Hebrew language and history are only too apt to overlook the historical and literal sense of the sacred Scriptures; the consequence of which is that they vainly and foolishly expend themselves in hunting after recondite and mystical meanings in the text where nothing of the kind exists.’ Before reading the prophets, in particular, he would therefore ‘have every one make himself acquainted not only with the Hebrew tongue, but with Hebrew history; for the prophets, without exception, followed history to the letter, although they also prefigured future events in their writings, led as they were by inspiration to conclusions having reference to the mystery of Christ. The power of the Scriptures, indeed, is of a fertilizing or prolific kind. Under a waning literal sense, they possess a vivifying spirit of renovation. It were, therefore, well that their meaning, apprehended as pointing in one direction, should not be overlooked as also pointing in another; and this the rather, seeing that the historical sense comes out ever the more clearly when the prospective bearing, which has Christ for its object, is kept in view—veiled under types and figures, indeed, and so not seen of the Jews, blinded by their prejudices, but now revealed to us in such wise that we seem to see the very face of our God.’

‘In our Commentaries,’ concludes the Expositor, ‘it will consequently be found that we have made it our particular study to elicit and present the old historical, but hitherto neglected, sense of the Scriptures. In this view, and to make available the author’s annotations, of which he has left a great many, we have taken no small amount of pains—non parum est nobis desudatum. Nor, indeed, had we to do with his annotations only; for the text of the copy we followed is corrected in numberless places by the hand of the author himself. I may, therefore, venture to affirm that Pagnini’s translation, as it now appears, approximates more closely to the meaning and spirit of the Hebrew than any former version. But the Church, and those learned in the Hebrew tongue, must be the judges here—any others are incompetent.’

From what he says, Villanovanus would therefore lead us to believe that he had had the privilege of working from a copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini himself, the author of the translation. But on a somewhat careful collation of the Villanovanus edition of 1542 with that of Lyons of 1527-28 (the editio princeps, we apprehend), and the reprint from this by Melchior Novesianus of Cologne, of 1541, we are forced on the conviction that Villanovanus followed no copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, but the fine edition of Novesianus, admirably edited by the learned publisher himself. The text of this is in fact identical with that of Villanovanus, and the headings to the chapters and references to corresponding and corroborative texts are all but uniformly alike in the two. There are no variorum readings, if we recollect aright, in the Novesianus; but neither are there any of the slightest significance in the Villanovanus—unless perchance the reader should think that the text is improved by Noah being directed in building the Ark to ‘pitch it with pitch’—picabis eam pice, instead of bitumen—bituminabis eam bitumine!

That Villanovanus followed Novesianus, and not any copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, is, as it were, demonstrated by this, that each page of the Address to the Reader, with the single exception of the first, begins and ends with the very same word in the two editions—which could not have been accidental: the compositor followed the copy he worked from page for page, line for line, word for word. We are sorry, therefore, to find our editor taking credit to himself in directions where none was due, and seeking, as it might seem, to shelter himself under the pious cowl of the orthodox Pagnini for the new and daring interpretation he himself puts upon so many passages of the Psalms and Prophets. Pagnini, one of the most learned hebraists and classical scholars of his country, was also a thoroughly orthodox monk, and would assuredly have been not a little astonished, and hardly pleased, we imagine, could he have seen himself in the guise in which he is presented by Michael Villanovanus. Had we but a single note from the hand of the learned Italian—and to the best of our belief we have not one—it could not have failed to be of the most rigidly orthodox kind, his own edition having the imprimatur of no fewer than two Popes, and a laudatory epistle from Jo. Franciscus Picus, nephew of the celebrated Joannes Picus de Mirandola, distinguished alike as a philosopher and theologian.

Villanovanus’s procedure in respect of the Pagnini Bible, on the face of the matter, is much to be regretted, and indeed is hardly to be understood. He may possibly have had an annotated copy of his author supplied him by his publisher; but if he had, in so far as we can see, he has followed Novesianus to the letter in his text and has given no comments but his own. The times in which Servetus lived, though different from ours in so many respects, were, as it seems, somewhat like them in so far as the meum and tuum in literature are concerned. Did we judge from the instance before us, we should say that they were still less respected three hundred years ago than they are in the present day. Calvin refers to Villanovanus’s ‘Pagnini’ in the course of the Geneva trial, and subsequently also in his ‘Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye foye.’ But he seems not to have known of the Novesianus edition, or he would certainly have challenged more than the comments, and had better grounds possibly than any he adduces for saying that the editor had dexterously filched—avait grippé beau et belle—five hundred livres from the publisher for his labour.

But all this, though illustrative of one element in the character of the subject of our study, and not to be passed over by us, is of less moment than the insight we gain through the comments—assuredly referable to him alone—into the intellectual side of his nature. In so far as we know, Servetus is nowhere even named as a biblical critic and expositor; yet did he precede by more than a century Spinoza, Astruc, Simon, Eichhorn, and others, founders of the modern school of Scriptural exegesis. The Old Testament texts referred by the writers of the New Testament to events still in the womb of time—to the coming especially of a liberator from their misery for the people of Israel in the shape of an anointed King, the conception of a late epoch in Jewish history—Servetus maintained had individuals in view who were alive and influential when the words were written, although he also admitted that they had a further prophetical or prospective sense of the kind commonly ascribed to them.

But he who believed in judicial astrology was not likely to have freed himself from that other still accredited form of superstitious belief which leads mankind, without so much as the aspects of the heavens to guide them, to fancy they can see into futurity. He had not divined, as we have now come to know, that even the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the shape in which they have reached us, date from no more remote an age than that which followed the Babylonian Captivity; that we have the work of two different writers under the name of Isaiah, the second of whom lived during or after the reign of Cyrus; and that the Apocalyptic Book of Daniel was written long after the personages there darkly shadowed forth had lived and died, and the events referred to had come and gone.

The narratives of the Pentateuch appear to have been accepted as properly historical by our editor. He did not, any more than the commentators who came after him almost to our own day, see them as mythical tales about individuals who lived, if they lived at all, and events that occurred, if they ever did occur, thousands—tens of thousands of years before any account of them could possibly have assumed the shape of legend, much less have been committed to writing. He has little, however, to say on the five books ascribed to Moses, and those of the quasi-historical complexion that follow them. Still his note on the words put into the mouth of Balaam, which tell of a star to come out of Jacob and a sceptre to arise out of Israel, is important. The prediction, as he interprets it, applies immediately to King David, though it has a farther prospective reference to Christ, with whose advent, as we know, it has long been all but exclusively connected. Our editor, however, was not helped by his superior knowledge of the stars to surmise that the writing was of a date long posterior to the reputed days of Balaam, the soothsayer of Mesopotamia, and Balak, king of Moab; that the predictions put into the mouth of the seer were all made after the events they pretend to foretell, and that King David had lived and died long before a word of the text was written; neither did he see that the writer who had King David in his eye could not have been thinking of an anointed king or captain who was only to appear some six or seven hundred years after Israel’s second sovereign had been gathered to his fathers.

Villanovanus is much more copious when he comes to the Psalms. The words in the second of our collection of these sacred lyrics, so much made of in dogmatic lore, Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.... Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee—he explains thus: ‘On the day when David had escaped from his enemy (Saul) he said, This day do I begin to live; at length I am king.’

The words in the fifth verse of that fine Psalm, the eighth, For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with honour and glory, he also refers immediately to King David, who, in times of persecution, abased himself; but, subsequently victorious, was crowned at last.

The passages, In Jehovah I put my trust, and How say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain, of Psalm xi., he refers to the time when David in fear of Saul escaped from the land of Judah.

The comment on the sixteenth verse of Psalm xxii., They pierced my hands and my feet, is again applied to David, when, flying from his enemies, and scrambling like a four-footed beast over rugged and thorny places, his hands and feet were lacerated—fugiente David per abrupta, instar quadrupedis, manus ejus et pedes lacerabantur.

Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire—Psalm xl. 6, signifies, says our commentator, that David, when a fugitive in the wilderness, offered no sacrifices.

In the verse, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever, Psalm xlv. 6, the word God, says our exponent, refers to Solomon, who, like Moses and Cyrus, is here styled Divus—God.

They gave me gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar as drink, of Psalm xlix. 22, says Villanovanus, is a passage referring to Nabal’s refusal and churlishness when David asked him for meat and drink.

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool, Psalm cx. 1. ‘This refers to David and Solomon, types alike of Christ, when David, having set his son on the throne beside him, addressed him as My Lord, and styled him a priest after the order of Melchizedek.’

Whilst thus in these and in many other instances referring the statements met with in the Psalms to individuals living or dead at the time they were written, and to events then in progress or past, Villanovanus still imagines that everything said, besides its literal and immediate signification, is also typical of personages and events to come—a system of exposition that has been pushed beyond all reasonable lengths by ignorance and superstition since his day. We may indeed be well assured that the writers of the Hebrew Psalms knew no more of what would happen five or six centuries after they were dust than we know of what will be going on in the world five or six hundred years after we are no more. Prophets, Seers, Diviners, Fortune-tellers and the like are ignored by the science of our age, although under the first of these designations they are still acknowledged by pious persons in the history of the past, and in its bearing on the religion of the present. The excuse for this is that the Prophets of Israel were inspired, or exceptionally gifted, with the power of seeing into futurity. But God, as we now conceive God, makes no exceptions to his laws. As they are, so have they ever been, and so will they ever continue to be. Said not Servetus himself aright when he declared that out of man there was no Holy Spirit, or Spirit of Inspiration?

But it is not on the Psalms that Villanovanus’s exposition, remarkable as it is, appears the most noteworthy. It is when he comes to the writings of the Prophets, as they are styled, that he puts forth his strength and shows his learning. And it shall come to pass in the last days that Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountain, and all nations shall flow unto it, says Isaiah (ii. 2 et seq.). These words, according to our expositor, refer to the reign of Hezekiah. Literally seen, they speak of the accession of Hezekiah, and the return of the captive Israelites to Jerusalem, the Assyrians having suffered a signal defeat without a battle fought.

In like manner, commenting on the second verse of the fourth chapter of Isaiah, where it is said, In that day shall the branch of Jehovah be beautiful and glorious, he says it is still Hezekiah and events transpiring in his reign that are alluded to, the king nevertheless being to be seen as a type of Christ.

The remarkable fourteenth verse of chapter vii. of the same writer, of which so much has been made, Villanovanus refers immediately to the times in which it was written. Syria and Ephraim confederate, under their kings Rezin and Pekah, are at war with Judah and threatening Jerusalem, whose king, Ahaz, the Prophet comforts with the assurance that the invasion, however formidable it looks, will come to nothing, and bids him ask for a sign from Jehovah that such will be the case. But Ahaz declining to do so, the Prophet volunteers a forecast of what he declares will come to pass, saying, Behold, a virgin (Almah—a young marriageable woman) shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel; and before the child shall know good from evil [arrive at years of discretion] the land will be freed from its enemies. ‘The Aramæans,’ says Villanovanus, ‘have come up in battle array against Jerusalem, and the prophet speaks of a young woman who shall conceive and bear a son, the young woman being no other than Abijah, about to become the mother of Hezekiah—strength or fortitude of God—and Immanuel—God with us—before whose reign the two kings, the enemies of Judah, will have been discomfited.’

The For unto us a child is born, &c., of chapter ix., he further refers to Hezekiah, for it was in his reign that Sennacherib and the Assyrians suffered such a signal defeat, the angel of Jehovah, according to the account, having slain in one night an hundred and four score and five thousand of them.

For they shall cry unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt, and he will send them a Saviour and he shall deliver them (Ib. xix. 20). ‘The Saviour,’ says Villanovanus, ‘is still no other than Hezekiah. Egypt as well as Judah, oppressed by the Assyrians, is relieved when the great army of Sennacherib is wrecked by the angel of Jehovah.’

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped (Ib. xxxv. 5), i.e. ‘Liberation from the yoke of the Assyrians will do much towards giving the Jewish people clearer and better ideas of God.’

Comfort ye my people.... The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, &c. (Ib. xl. 1-3). ‘These are words addressed to Cyrus, praying him to open a way through the desert for Israel, returning from the captivity of Babylon;’ and the ninth verse, O Zion, that bringest good tidings ... say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God, he says, ‘refers literally to Cyrus, who is here styled God; as does also the eighteenth verse, To whom will ye liken God (i.e. Cyrus), or what likeness will ye compare unto him? ‘In many striking ways,’ adds our expositor, ‘the prophet would lead the rude Jews, on their redemption from the Babylonian captivity, to cease from idolatry and to believe in God, the Creator of the world.’

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Surely he hath borne our griefs ... he was wounded for our transgressions, &c. (Ib. liii.). ‘In these passages, which also involve a great mystery referable to Christ,’ says Villanovanus, ‘the Prophet laments over Cyrus, slain, as it were, for the sins of the people, who, however, will suffer still more under Cambyses, his successor, when the building of the Temple, now begun, will be interrupted.’

Arise, shine, for thy light is come.... They from Sheba shall come, and shall bring gold and incense, &c., (Ib. lx.), i.e. ‘taken literally, and as it stands, these words refer to the great days of the Second Temple, when Jerusalem was again in its glory.’

Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah (Ib. lxiii.), i.e. ‘Cyrus has inflicted severe chastisement on Edom, and brought back those who had been carried thither from Jerusalem into captivity, as we read in the fifteenth chapter, where it is said, The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion.’

Behold the days will come, saith the Lord, when I shall raise unto David a righteous branch (Jerem. xxiii. 5). The individual here referred to our exponent believes to be Zerubabel.

Know, therefore, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah, the Prince, is seven weeks, and three-score and two weeks ... and after three-score and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off and be no more (Daniel, ix. 25). ‘The times specified,’ says Villanovanus, ‘refer to those of the exile and the return of the captives by favour of Cyrus, who is the Messiah or Anointed One of God, that is here spoken of. Sixty-two weeks having passed from the great event, Cyrus will have been cut off, and all have gone to wreck again.’

Then shall Judah and Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, &c., i.e. ‘Judah and Israel will have become united for a season, as they were under Hezekiah.’

The words of the second verse of chapter vi., After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, ‘refer to the extraordinary discomfiture of the Assyrians in the reign of Hezekiah.’

For behold, in those days when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all the nations, &c. (Joel, iii. 1). ‘These words have a literal application to the defeat of the Assyrians and the glories of Hezekiah’s reign. Disasters many have befallen the chosen seed; but their oppressors will in turn be desolated, and Judah, restored, shall dwell for ever in Jerusalem.’

The texts in Micah generally spoken of as exclusively prophetical of Christ, our commentator thinks refer literally to Hezekiah and times subsequent to the defeat of the Assyrians. But thou, Bethlehem-Ephratah, out of thee shall he come forth to be a ruler in Israel, viz., ‘Hezekiah, who will deliver the people from the Assyrian.’

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion; shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem; behold, thy King cometh unto thee lowly, and riding upon an ass, even on a colt, the foal of an ass. This text, which is referred to Christ in Matthew (chapter xxii.), is connected by Villanovanus with the compassionate Zerubabel and his entrance into Jerusalem.

No one will be surprised to learn that these comments of the learned Villanovanus did not escape the notice of the great ecclesiastical centres of his day. That of Lyons is by-and-by found condemning outright both them and the book they pretend to illustrate. That of Madrid is content to order by far the greater number of the glosses to be expunged, but leaves the Bible itself available to the privileged; whilst that of Rome, less tolerant, not only condemns the expositions, but puts the book upon the Index prohibitorius. The perusal of such comments, preparatory to drawing the pen through them, it was surmised by the far-sighted ecclesiastics of Rome might lead to independent thought, and this is precisely what the Church they represent would have every man, woman, and child in the land most carefully to eschew.

Calvin, we may imagine, was not likely to think any better of Villanovanus’s annotations than the heads of the Church of Rome; on the contrary, pinning his faith on its text as prophetical in the very strictest sense of the word, any attack on its sufficiency as a ground for dogmatic conclusion was felt by him to be a matter much more serious than by the Church of Rome, which sets its own traditions as equipollent to, where not even of higher authority than, that of the Bible on all matters of faith. To see the Scriptures of the Jews otherwise than as Calvin and the Reformers saw them was, in their eyes, to question the infallible book they had substituted for the infallible Pope so lately abandoned by them. We should therefore expect to meet Calvin, with occasion serving, making a point against our expositor on the ground of the Pagnini; and accordingly we find Servetus’s comments brought up against him in the most marked manner during his Geneva Trial, whilst in the Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye Foye, and the Defensio orthodoxæ Fidei, they are spoken of as impertinences and impieties, the Publisher being said at the same time to have been nothing less than cheated out of the money he paid the editor for his work. ‘Who,’ says Calvin, ‘shall venture to say that it was not thievish in the editor when he took five hundred livres in payment for the vain trifles and impious follies with which he encumbered almost every page of the book?’ (‘Opusc. Theol. Om.’ p. 703).

Notwithstanding the great Reformer’s denunciations, however, though we may not agree with Villanovanus in all his conclusions, nor approve of his passing without mention Melchior Novesianus, to whom he was indebted for his text, when we look on the beautiful volume he aided in producing, and think of him as the one man of his age who had independent opinions on the real or possible meaning of the poetical writings of the Hebrew people, consonant as these are in so many respects with the views entertained by the most advanced biblical critics of the present day, we are not disposed to think that he was overpaid. Had the Church dignitaries of Vienne seen the Pagnini Bible of Michael Villanovanus with the same eyes as the hierarchs of Rome, Madrid, and Lyons, the matter he added must needs have seriously compromised him with them. His numerous, excessively free, and highly heterodox interpretations of the Psalms and Prophets, nevertheless, in so far as we have been able to discover, appear to have lost Villeneuve neither countenance nor favour at Vienne, which is not a little extraordinary.

CHAPTER XVI.

ENGAGEMENT AS EDITOR BY JO. FRELON OF LYONS—CORRESPONDENCE WITH CALVIN.

The Pagnini Bible out of hand, Villanovanus’s time would seem not yet to have been so fully occupied by his profession as to debar him from continuing to engage in a good deal of miscellaneous literary work for his friends the publishers of Lyons, among the number of whom we have now particularly to notice John Frelon, a man of learning, like so many of the old publishers, entertaining tolerant or more liberal views of the religious question, inclined towards, if not openly professing, the Reformed Faith, and the personal friend of Calvin.

For Frelon Villeneuve edited a variety of works, mostly, as it seems, of an educational kind, such as grammars, accidences, and the like; translating several of these from Latin into Spanish, for the laity; and, as the priesthood of the Peninsula appear not to have cultivated the classical languages of Greece and Rome to the same extent as those of France and Germany, also turning the Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas, a work entitled Desiderius peregrinus, and another, the Thesaurus animæ Christianæ, into their vernacular for them.[55] Brought into somewhat intimate relationship with Villeneuve, whom Frelon at this time could not have known as Michael Servetus, the Reformation, its principles, its objects, and the views of its more distinguished leaders, would hardly fail to come up as topics of conversation between him and his learned editor. Frelon must soon have seen how much better than common Villeneuve was informed in this direction; and it has been said, not without every show of truth, that at his suggestion Servetus, under his assumed name of Villeneuve or Villanovanus, was led to enter on the correspondence with Calvin which we believe had so momentous an influence on his future fate. Frelon saw Villeneuve full of unusual ideas on many of the accredited dogmas of the Christian faith; and, not indisposed, though indifferently prepared, to discuss these himself, he very probably suggested the great Reformer of Geneva as the man of all others the most likely to feel an interest in them, as well as the most competent to give an opinion on their merits. Hence the correspondence which, begun in 1546, went on into 1547, and may even have extended into the following year.

That Frelon was the medium of communication between Villeneuve and Calvin is satisfactorily shown by the publisher’s letter to the Spaniard, inclosing one for him just received from the Reformer. The correspondence, however, must have already been started and Villeneuve been complaining to Frelon that he had been long without an answer to the last of his letters. Frelon, in turn, would seem to have written to Calvin, reminding him that his friend Villeneuve had for some time past been expecting to hear from him. Writing at length under his well-known pseudonym of Charles Despeville, in reply to Frelon, Calvin says:—

‘Seigneur Jehan, Your last letter found me on the eve of my departure from home, and I had not time then to reply to the inclosure it contained. I take advantage of the first moment I have to spare since my return, to comply with your wishes; not indeed that I have any great hope of proving serviceable to such a man, seeing him disposed as I do. But I will try once more if there be any means left of bringing him to reason, and this will happen when God shall have so worked in him that he become altogether other than he is. I have been led to write to him more sharply than is my wont, being minded to take him down a little in his presumption; and I assure you there is no lesson he needs so much to learn as humility. This may perhaps come to him through the grace of God, not otherwise, as it seems. But we too ought to lend a helping hand. If God give him and us such grace as to have the letter I now forward turn to profit, I shall have cause to rejoice. If he goes on writing to me in the style he has hitherto seen fit to use, however, you will only lose your time in soliciting me farther in his behalf; for I have other business that concerns me more nearly, and I shall make it matter of conscience to devote myself to it, not doubting that he is a Satan who would divert me from studies more profitable. Let me beg of you therefore to be content with what I have already done, unless you see most pressing occasion for acting differently.

‘Recommending myself to you and praying God to have you in his keeping, I am your servant and friend—

‘Charles Despeville.

[Geneva] ‘this 13 of February, 1546.’

This is surely neither an indifferent nor an unreasonable letter; yet does it give us to know that the epistle it enclosed, both in manner and matter, was likely to give offence to one with the haughty and self-sufficing nature of Michael Servetus. He had addressed the Reformer on transcendental dogmatic subjects, and probably urged his views with the warmth that strong conviction lends to language, and without anything like the deferential tone to which Calvin was accustomed. This proved particularly distasteful to the head of the Church of Geneva, who had certainly thought as deeply, and may even have entertained as serious misgivings, on some of the topics propounded, as his correspondent. Hence the unwonted sharpness of the reply; hence, also, the fire which Villeneuve caught at being lectured like a schoolboy; and hence, in fine, the irritating, disrespectful, and regrettable character on either side of the correspondence that followed.

In transmitting Calvin’s letter to Villeneuve, Frelon addresses him thus:—

‘Dear Brother and Friend! You will see by the enclosed why you had not sooner an answer to your letter. Had I had anything to communicate at an earlier date, I should not have failed to send to you immediately, as I promised. Be assured that I wrote to the personage in question, and that there was no want of punctuality on my part. I think, however, that with what you have now, you will be as well content as if you had had it sooner. I send my own man express with this, having no other messenger at command. If I can be of use to you in anything else, I beg to assure you, you will always find me ready to serve you. Your good brother and friend, Jehan Frelon.

‘To my good brother and friend, master Michael Villanovanus, Doctor in medicine, Vienne.’

It is matter of deep regret that with the exception of the first communication of Calvin to Villeneuve, which is in the form of an essay rather than a familiar epistle, and was written some time before the stinging missive sent through Frelon, we have nothing from him that would have enabled us to judge of the general style and character of his letters, though of this we may form an estimate from his subsequent writings. Calvin was far too much engaged to make copies of his letters, and we may feel certain that Villeneuve, on the first intimation of danger threatening him from the authorities of Vienne, destroyed every scrap of writing he had ever had from the Reformer, calculated as it was to compromise him in the eyes of Roman Catholics. Forced, for the sake of his French correspondents, to resort to a pseudonym, Calvin had probably addressed Villeneuve in his proper name. The letter to Frelon and the one from Frelon to Villeneuve must have been overlooked, or thought to contain nothing that could be adversely interpreted, and so found their way to the Judicial Archives of Vienne, whence they were recovered and published by Mosheim.[56]

The letters of Villeneuve to Calvin, or a certain number of them, at all events, have been transmitted to us by their writer in a section of his work on the Restoration of Christianity; and we turned to them with the interest of expectation, thinking we might there find a key to the singular and persistent hostility with which Calvin shows himself to have been animated towards his correspondent. Nor were we disappointed. The style of address indulged in by Villeneuve, as the correspondence proceeds, is as if purposely calculated to wound, if not even to insult, a man in the position of John Calvin, conscious of his own superiority, jealous of his authority, and become so sensitive to everything like disrespectful bearing on the part of those who approached him. But of deference or respect, save at the outset, there is not a trace in any of the letters of Villeneuve. On the contrary, they have often an air of something like familiarity that must have been extremely disagreeable to Calvin. Add to this the unseemly and disparaging epithets with which he pelts the irritable Reformer, and we have warrant enough for our assumption that, mainly out of this unfortunate epistolary encounter, was the enmity engendered which took such hold of Calvin’s mind as led him to see in a mere theological dissident a dangerous innovator and deadly personal foe.

The correspondence at the outset, however, had nothing of the unseemly character it acquired as it proceeded. Villeneuve approached the Reformer at first as one seeking aid and information from another presumed most capable of giving both; and this was precisely the style of address that suited Calvin. The subjects on which he desired the Reformer’s opinion were theological, of course, and of great gravity, involving topics of no less moment than the sense in which the Divinity and Sonship of Christ, the Doctrine of Regeneration, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, were to be understood.

In a letter to a friend of a later date Calvin speaks as if he believed that these questions had been proposed in mockery, or to get him into difficulty; but this was an afterthought, and when he had come to persuade himself that Servetus was a man devoid of all religious principle. Nothing of any suspicion of the kind he hints at appears in his reply to the first communication he received, for it is sober, earnest, and to the point, each subject being taken up in succession and discussed, now in conformity with his own particular views, and then with the interpretation of the Churches.

Servetus’s questions to Calvin, three in number, were propounded categorically, and in the following order:—

1st.—Was the man Jesus, who was crucified, the Son of God; and what is the rationale of the Sonship (filiatio)?

2nd.—Is the Kingdom of heaven in man; when is it entered; and when is regeneration effected?

3rd.—Is Baptism to be received in faith, like the Supper; and in what sense are these institutions to be held as the New Covenant?

To the first, Calvin replies: ‘We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, the man who was crucified, was the Son of God, and say that the Wisdom of God, born of the Eternal Father before all time, having become incarnate, was now manifested in the flesh. Therefore do we acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God by his humanity; therefore, also, do we say that he is God—sed ideo quod Deus. As by his human nature, he is engendered of the seed of David, and so is said to be the Son of David; by parity of reason, and because of his divine nature, is he the Son of God. Christ, however, is One, not Two-fold; he is at once the Son of God and the Son of Man. You own him as the Son of God, but do not admit the oneness, save in a confused way. We, who say that the Son of God is our Brother, as well as the true Immanuel, nevertheless acknowledge in the One Christ the Majesty of God and the Humility of man. But you, confounding these, destroy both; for, acknowledging God manifest in the flesh, you say the divinity is the flesh itself, the humanity God Himself.’

To the second he answers: ‘The Kingdom of God, we say, begins in men when they are regenerated; and we are said to be regenerated when, enlightened by faith in Christ, we yield entire obedience to God. I deny, however, that regeneration takes place in a moment; it is enough if progress be made therein even to the hour of death.’

To the third he says: ‘We do not deny that Baptism requires faith; but not such as is required in the communion of the Supper; and in respect of Baptism we see it as nugatory until the promise of God involved in the rite is apprehended in faith.’ He concludes by assimilating the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to the Circumcision and Passover of the olden time.

Calvin, we thus see, addressed himself not only to the questions sent, but also in answer to the letter which doubtless accompanied them, in which the writer must have given some intimation of his own views.

That Calvin’s communication, couched in rigidly orthodox terms, though unobjectionable in style, was not calculated to satisfy Villeneuve, we cannot doubt. His mind was already as thoroughly made up—even more thoroughly made up, we apprehend, on some of the points advanced—than Calvin’s. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the Genevese Reformer’s expositions were repudiated as little satisfactory by the physician of Vienne, or to discover that the correspondence on his part was not suffered to drop. He appears to have replied immediately, and must have written in sequence no fewer than thirty letters to Calvin on his favourite theological subjects, so many being printed in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio.’ In answer to these Calvin must also have sent him more than one or two, though certainly many fewer than thirty; for by the letter to Frelon, written evidently at an early period of the correspondence, we see him already weary of it.

With his hands more than full in administering the affairs of the Genevese Church, holding his political opponents the Libertines in check at home, and corresponding with friends and the heads of all the other Reformed Churches abroad, it is not wonderful that, besides feeling disquieted by the matter and offended with the manner of Villeneuve’s addresses, he had soon made up his mind to have nothing more to do with the writer. He saw, moreover, that he made no impression on him, each new epistle being, as he says to a friend, but ‘a wearisome iteration of the same cuckoo note.’ Calvin’s vocation, however, was to be helpful in what he believed to be God’s work, and to preach the Gospel as he apprehended it. True to his trust, therefore, and by way of meeting his troublesome correspondent’s further importunities,—as a balsam competent to heal the wounds and strengthen the weak places in the soul of the distempered man, he seems to have thought he might escape further molestation by referring him to his own ‘Institutions of the Christian Religion,’ his master work, the canon of the Church of which he was the founder and acknowledged head. In this view, as we venture to presume, Calvin sent Villeneuve a copy of his ‘Institutions,’ and referred him to its pages for satisfactory replies to all his propositions.

It is impossible to imagine that Servetus had continued until this time unacquainted with Calvin’s writings; he had doubtless read them all; but he may not have made the ‘Institutiones Religionis Christianæ’ the subject of the particular study on which he was now forced, as it were, by its author, and with the result that might have been foreseen: there was hardly a proposition in the text that was not taken to pieces by him, and found untenable, on the ground both of Scripture and Patristic authority.

In the course of the correspondence hitherto, Calvin had stood on the vantage ground, as critic of his correspondent’s views; but matters were now reversed, for Villeneuve became the critic of the Reformer. He by and by returned the copy of the ‘Institutions,’ copiously annotated on the margins, not only in no terms of assent, but generally with the unhappy freedom of expression in which he habitually indulged, and so little complimentary to the author himself, as it seems, that Calvin, in writing to a friend and in language not over-savoury, says:—‘There is hardly a page that is not defiled by his vomit.’ The liberties taken with the ‘Institutions,’ we may well imagine, were looked on as a crowning personal insult by Calvin; and, reading the nature of the man as we do, they may have been that, super-added to the letters, which put such rancour into his soul as made him think of the life of his critic, turned by him into his calumniator, as no more than a fair forfeit for the offence done.

It was at this time precisely, as it appears, that Calvin wrote that terribly compromising letter to Farel, so long contested by his apologists, but now admitted on all hands—as indeed how could it be longer denied, seeing that it is still in existence?—in which he says: ‘Servetus wrote to me lately, and beside his letter sent me a great volume full of his ravings, telling me with audacious arrogance that I should there find things stupendous and unheard of until now. He offers to come hither if I approve; but I will not pledge my faith to him; for did he come, if I have any authority here, I should never suffer him to go away alive.’[57]

Nor is this the only letter written at this time by Calvin which shows with what despite he regarded Servetus. Jerome Bolsec, a quondam monk, now a physician, opposed to the Papacy and but little less hostilely inclined to Calvin, speaking of the Reformer’s persecution of Servetus—‘an arrogant and insolent man, forsooth,’—and of Servetus having addressed a number of letters to him along with the MS. of a work he had written, and a copy of the ‘Institutions of the Christian Religion,’ full of annotations little complimentary to the author,—goes on to say: ‘Since which time Calvin, greatly incensed, conceived a mortal antipathy to the man, and meditated with himself to have him put to death. This purpose he proclaimed in a letter to Pierre Viret of Lausanne, dated the Ides of February (1546). Among other things in this letter, he says: “Servetus desires to come hither, on my invitation; but I will not plight my faith to him; for I have determined, did he come, that I would never suffer him to go away alive.” This letter of Calvin fell into my hands by the providence of God, and I showed it to many worthy persons—I know, indeed, where it is still to be found.’ Bolsec says further that Calvin wrote to Cardinal Tournon denouncing Servetus of heresy, some time before making use of William Trie in the same view to the authorities of Lyons and Vienne, and that the Cardinal laughed heartily at the idea of one heretic accusing another. ‘This letter of Calvin to Cardinal Tournon,’ says Bolsec in continuation, ‘was shown to me by M. du Gabre, the Cardinal’s secretary. William Trie also wrote several letters to Lyons and Vienne at the instigation of Calvin, which led to the arrest of Servetus; but he escaped from prison.’

These statements of Bolsec, like the letter to Farel, have been called in question and their truth denied by Calvin’s apologists; but they tally in every respect with what else we know, and explain some things that would have remained obscure without them. If Calvin wrote to Farel in the terms he certainly did, we have no difficulty in believing that he addressed his alter ego, Viret, in the same way. What is said of the letter to Cardinal Tournon, also, has every appearance of truth. The Cardinal took no notice of the heresy proclaimed from such a quarter as Geneva; or if he hinted at the matter to his friend the Archbishop of Vienne, Paumier’s good report of Doctor Villeneuve put a stop to further inquiry.[58]

More has probably been made of the letter to Farel, by the enemies of Calvin, than is altogether fair. Grotius, who was the first to notice it, says: ‘It shows that Antichrist had not appeared by Tiber only, but by Lake Leman also.’ When Calvin wrote to Farel, however, he did not contemplate the likelihood of Servetus ever falling into his hands. Neither, indeed, though grievously offending, had the Spaniard yet shown himself utterly incorrigible, a lost creature, fore-ordained of God, as it seemed, to perdition. At the time Calvin wrote the letter of February, 1546, to Farel

His murder yet was but fantastical,

It was at a later period, when the guilt as he held it of the man he persistently regarded as the enemy of God and all religion as well as of himself, was full-blown, and the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ appeared in print, that the threat of bygone years took the shape of present stern resolve.

Had we but Calvin’s letter to Villeneuve, ‘written more sharply than was his wont,’ we should, beyond question, find matter little calculated to flatter the somewhat presumptuous self-confident man, and may be fully as certain that the terms in which any future missive was couched, were not more soothing or conciliatory. But Servetus had come to look on himself as commissioned in some sort by God to proclaim a purer form of Christianity to the world; and any assumption of superiority on the part of Calvin, was met by a four-fold show of independence from himself. Yet does Servetus, once embarked in the correspondence, satisfy us that he had fallen under the spell of the great Reformer; fascinated as it seems by him and, far from being repelled by either his coldness or his harshness, finding it impossible to forbear making ever new attempts upon his patience for recognition, were it even of a little complimentary kind.

The ‘great volume full of ravings,’ spoken of in the letter to Farel, must have been a MS. copy of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ already written, but not perhaps finally revised. Upon this work it does not appear that Calvin ever condescended to offer any strictures; although it was doubtless accompanied by a letter—not printed among the thirty—requesting an opinion on its merits. But even as he never had anything of the kind, neither, although repeatedly asked for, both directly and through others, as we learn, could Servetus ever get back his manuscript. Whether retained in mere contempt, or as evidence against the writer, with occasion presenting, as has been surmised, we do not know; but certain it is that Calvin remained persistently deaf to all the writer’s entreaties to have his work returned to him. If not purposely retained in view of the contingency hinted at, it was eventually used in such wise; for it was among the Documents furnished by Calvin through Trie to the authorities of Vienne with the immediate effect of bringing about the arrest of its writer and imperilling his life.

Turn we to the letters to Calvin, less in view of their theological import—the point from which alone they have hitherto been regarded by the biographers of Servetus—than as calculated to let us into the secret of the misunderstanding and enmity that took such entire possession of the mind of the Genevese Reformer. In Servetus’s style of address, as we have said, we at once note an entire absence of the obsequiousness to which Calvin was accustomed. Far from approaching the Reformer as a Gamaliel at whose feet he was to kneel and take lessons, Servetus assumes the part, not merely of the equal, but often of the superior, and is by no means nice in the terms in which he challenges the points he holds erroneous in the doctrines of the great man he is addressing. In the very first of the thirty epistles he wrote, whilst stating an opinion which he knew Calvin must think heretical or even blasphemous, he ‘desires him to remember—memineris quæso, &c.—that the Man, Jesus Christ, was truly begotten of the substance of God;’ and in the second of the series informs him quite bluntly that he is mistaken in his interpretation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He even attempts to fix him on the horns of a dilemma by showing that Calvin’s view, if accepted, would lead to the assumption not of one Son of God, but of three Sons of God. ‘But all such tritheistic notions,’ he continues, ‘are illusions of Satan, and they who acknowledge the Trinity of the Beast (i.e. of Papal Christianity) are possessed by three spirits of demons. False are all the invisible Gods of the Trinitarians, as false as the gods of the Babylonians. Farewell!’ This at the outset is certainly not very respectful from the physician of Vienne to the Spiritual Dictator of Geneva!

The third epistle commences in the same easy style: ‘Sæpius te monui—I have repeatedly admonished you.’ It is on the way in which he imagines Christ to have been engendered by God, and so to be truly and naturally His Son; adding that he has always taught the eternity of the Divine Reason, styled The Word, as prefiguring Christ, in whose face at the Incarnation, he says, Man first verily saw the face of God. ‘You are offended with me,’ he proceeds, ‘for speaking as I do of the human form of Christ; but have patience and I shall lead you up to my conclusion—te manducam,’ etc. Fancy John Calvin feeling himself taken in hand by Michael Servetus!

The fourth, sixth, and seventh epistles are remarkable for their pantheistic views. ‘God,’ says Servetus, ‘is only known through manifestation, or communication, in one shape or another. In Creation God opened the gates of His Treasury of Eternity,’ says he very grandly. ‘Containing the Essence of the Universe in Himself, God is everywhere, and in every thing, and in such wise that he shows himself to us as fire, as a flower, as a stone.’ Existence, in a word, of every kind is in, and of, God, and in itself is always good; it is act or direction that at any time is bad. But evil as well as good he thinks is also comprised in the essence of God. This is indicated, he conceives, by the Hebrew word, ‘π’ (ihei); and he illustrates his position by the text: ‘I form light and create darkness.’ All accidents, further, are in God; whatever befals is not apart from God. Without beginning and without end, God is always becoming—Semper est Deus in fieri.

In the eighth and ninth letters he informs Calvin that he ‘would have him know how the Logos and Sapientia, the Divine Word, the Divine Reason, were to be understood, in order that he should not go on abusing these sacred words;’ and it is here that we meet with various expressions which only acquire significance when the pantheistic ideas with which he is full are borne in mind. Here, too, we find the reason why he would not concede that Calvin and the Reformers held the true belief in Christ as the Son of God:—Ille est vere filius Dei quem in muliere genuit Deus, non ille quem tu somniasti! Neither did the Reformers, in his eyes, rightly apprehend Justification, which, according to him, only comes through belief in the Sonship of Christ as he conceives it.

In the eleventh epistle he says he thinks it will be labour well spent if he exposes the error into which his correspondent falls in his interpretation of the Doctrine of James. Calvin and his sect, we know, set little store by works of charity and mercy. ‘All that men do,’ proceeds our letter-writer, ‘you say is done in sin and is mixed with dregs that stink before God, and merit nothing but eternal death. But therein you blaspheme. Stripping us of all possible goodness you do violence to the teaching of Christ and his Apostles, who ascribe perfection or the power of being perfect to us: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt. v. 48.) You scout this celestial perfection because you have never tasted perfection of the kind yourself. In the works of the Saintly, I say, there is nothing of the corruption you feign. The works of the Spirit shine before God and before men, and in themselves are good and proper. Thou reprobate and blasphemer, who calumniatest the works of the Spirit—Tu improbus et blasphemus qui opera Spiritus calumniaris!’

Can we wonder at Calvin’s rage with the man who dared to address him in such language as this? On his trial at Geneva Servetus tells his judges that the correspondence between him and the Reformer degenerated by degrees on both sides into mutual recrimination and abuse. In the above objectionable passage we see, if not the beginning, yet a significant sample of this unhappy style, which continues even to the end. Had we Calvin’s letters, we should certainly find them not more guarded in expression—for Calvin was a master of invective, with a superabundant vocabulary of epithets at command, and never choice in the use of those he applied to opponents—rascal, dog, ass, and swine being found of constant occurrence among them—had there been any stronger than scoundrel and blasphemer, they would assuredly have been hurled at Servetus.

Referring to the subject of Justification, Calvin, as we presume, must have said, in one of his letters, that Justification is imputed by God, and that no change takes place in him who is justified. To this Servetus, in his thirteenth epistle, exclaims: ‘What do I hear? The spirit of man suffers no change through sin! But if sin cause change, then must there also be change when sin is taken away. He, forsooth, who sits in darkness differs in nothing from him who sits in light! Your justification is Satanic merely if the conscience within you remains as it was before, and your new life of faith differs in nothing from the old death. God grant, O Calvin, that, ridding you of your magical fascinations, you may abound to overflowing in all good things; but Peter’s disputation against Simon Magus refutes you, teaching, as it does, the excellence of works even in the heathen. The justification you preach, therefore, is mere magical fascination and folly.’

In another of his letters Calvin must have asked Servetus where the Apostle John teaches that we in this world are such as was Christ? Which his correspondent answers by referring him to the fourth chapter of the Epistle general, where he would find these words: ‘Because as he is, so are we in this world.’ We can fancy how vexed Calvin must have been with himself for the slip he had made, as well as angry with the triumph of his opponent, who continues: ‘But you neither rightly understand Faith in Christ, nor good works, nor the Celestial Kingdom. In the New Covenant a new and living way was inaugurated; but you, true Jew—tu vero Judaico—would shame me by a show of zeal and whelm me with contumely because I say with Christ, “He who is least shall in this Kingdom be greater than Abraham.”’

If Calvin neither understands the nature of Faith, nor of Justification, we shall not wonder when we find that no more is he credited with comprehending Regeneration, ‘You have not understood true Regeneration, nor the Celestial Kingdom, whereof Faith is the gate. Regeneration, I maintain, comes through baptism; you say that Christ thought nothing of the water. But is it not written that we are born anew by water? and is it not of water that Paul speaks when he designates baptism the Laver of Regeneration, saying, “We are cleansed from sin by washing with water?” Men, you say, are regenerate when they are enlightened; you must therefore concede that they who are baptized in their infancy, being without understanding and so unenlightened, cannot be regenerated. Yet do you contend that they are properly baptized. Dissevering regeneration from baptism you make baptism a sign of adoption; but you deceive yourself in this, the Scriptures declaring that adoption is effected when to the believer is given the spirit of the divine Sonship—πνεύμα Ὑωοθεσίος. On your own showing, then, infants, being unregenerate, can enter the Kingdom of Heaven neither by faith nor by hope; and thou, thief and robber—tu Fur et Latro(!)—keepest them from the gate. As a prelude to Baptism Peter required repentance. Let your infants repent, then; and do you yourself repent and come to baptism, having true faith in Jesus Christ—pœniteat te igitur, et vere Jesu Christi fide ad baptismum accede—to the end that you may receive the gift of the Holy Spirit promised therein. But you satisfy yourself with illusions, and say that the infants who die [unbaptized?] were predestined, impudently misusing sacred speech as is your wont; for in the Scriptures predestination is not spoken of save in connection with belief and believers. God, I say, sees no one justified from eternity unless he believes.’ Let us think of Calvin, spiritual dictator to one half of reformed Christendom, schooled in this style by the poor body-curer of Vienne! called thief and robber to his face, and all the more irate with his teacher from feeling, as we fancy he must have felt, that he had not always the best of the argument. Servetus’s dialectic is at least a match for his own.

But our restorer of Christianity has not yet done with his pædo-baptism: the subject is continued in the next letter, which closes with a prayer in the very finest spirit of piety, but to Calvin may possibly have seemed profane, he having made up his mind that Servetus was not only without religion himself, but bent on effacing religion from the heart of man. Here is the prayer:—

‘O thou, most merciful Jesus, who with such signs of love and blessing didst take the little ones into thine arms, bless them now and ever, and with Thy guiding hand so lead them that in faith they may become partakers of Thy Heavenly Kingdom. Amen!’

Calvin, we believe, treats the ‘Descent into Hell’ as legendary. Servetus thinks the Hebrew word Scheol signifies the grave as well as the traditional hell, and seems to make it a kind of resting-place for the unregenerate until the resurrection. Adam, he says, by his transgression fell both soul and body into the power of the Serpent. But where can the soul of him be after death who is the slave of such a master? Are not the gates of Paradise closed against him?—is not the whole man given over to the power of the mighty tyrant? ‘Who shall set him free? No one, assuredly, but Christ’—and so on, in terms entirely unobjectionable, and in complete conformity with accredited opinion; but tending, we imagine, to what is called Universalism, Servetus believing, as we read him, that all men would be saved in the end, though ordinary sinners would have to wait until the day of Judgment. He nowhere speaks of any lake of burning brimstone, fanned by the Devil, in which the wicked are tortured throughout eternity. Annihilation, with him, is the penalty of unpardonable sin.

The Twentieth Epistle is especially interesting as showing us the very heart of the writer; letting us into his secret, as it were, and showing us the ideas that led him to his scheme of restoring the lapsed faith of mankind in Christ as the naturally begotten Son of God, and of reconstituting his Church, long vanished from the face of the earth. The true Church, however, is not to be thought of as an institution made by man, but as a foundation originated by Christ. And the question as to where this true Church exists, is not difficult of determination if the authority of the Scriptures be admitted as paramount in matters of belief. But the authority of the Scriptures, and of the true Church represented by those purified by the water of baptism and governed by the Holy Spirit, he says, is equal ‘The true Church of Christ, indeed, is independent of the Scriptures. There was a Church of Christ before there was any writing of the Apostles. But where is now the Church? Ever present in celestial spirits and the souls of the blest, it fled from earth as many as 1260 years ago. It is in heaven, and typified by the woman adorned with the sun and the twelve stars (Revelation). Invisible among us now, it will again be seen before long. We with ours, the congregation of Christ, will be the Church. Towards the restoration of this Church it is that I labour incessantly; and it is because I mix myself up with that battle of Michael and the Angels, and seek to have all the pious on my side, that you are displeased with me. As the good angels did battle in heaven against the Dragon, so do other angels now contend against the Papacy on earth. Do you not believe that the angels will prevail? But as the Dragon could not, so neither can the Papacy, be worsted without the angels. The celestial regeneration by baptism it is that makes us equals of the angels in our war with spiritual iniquity. See you not, then, that the question is the restoration of the Church driven from among us? The words of John show us that a battle was in prospect: seduction was to precede, the battle was to follow; and the time is now at hand. Who, think you, are they who shall gain the victory over the Beast? They, assuredly, who have not received his mark. Grant, O God, to thy soldier that with thy might he may manfully bear him against the Dragon, who gave such power to the Beast. Amen!’

In the above we have the whole mystical being of the man laid bare before us, and the nature of the cause in which he was engaged made known. Servetus certainly believed that he was an instrument in the hand of God for proclaiming a better saving faith to the world. It was by a certain Divine impulse, he says himself, that he was led to his subject, and woe to him did he not evangelise! He seems even to have thought that he had his vocation shadowed out to him in his name. The angel Michael led the embattled hosts of heaven to war against the Dragon; and he, Michael Servetus, had been chosen to lead the angels on earth against Antichrist! The Roman interpretation of Christianity, with its Pope and hierarchy, its assumed sovereignty, its pompous ceremonial and ritualistic apparatus, had failed to make the world either wiser or better; the entire system was rotten to the core; hence the revolt of such scholarly monks as Erasmus and Luther, and of such learned priests as Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bullinger, Bucer, and the rest. But they, too, still showed more or less of the ‘mark of the Beast.’ They had rid themselves of the Mass and Transubstantiation, of compromises for sin by payments in money, of monkeries, nunneries, the invocation of saints, prayers to the Virgin, and so on; but they had retained much that was objectionable—particularly a Trinity of persons in the Godhead (tantamount, said Servetus, to the recognition of three Gods instead of one God), and infant baptism.

By their strenuous insistance on the effects of Adam’s transgression as compromising mankind at large, and Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his only son, they had moreover interspersed the religion of Christ with such an amount of Judaism that their Christianity was in many respects a relapse into the bonds of the Law, from which Christ had set us free. A reformation of the Church had been commenced, therefore, but was by no means completed; much still remained to be done; the world was waiting, in fact, for a better interpretation of Christ’s life and doctrine as contained in the Gospels, and this the studies and meditations of Michael Servetus, he believed, qualified him in no mean measure to supply. Hence the books on Trinitarian Error and the Restoration of Christianity; and hence, also, the hostility of Calvin and his followers, who were minded that they had already reformed and restored, and verily represented, or were in fact, the true Church.

Like the leaders of other bands of enthusiasts of which the world has seen so many, Servetus, relying on the New Testament record, thought that the day was at hand when Christ should appear in the clouds to judge the world and consummate all things. He overlooked the fact that Paul, whom he resembled in so many respects, had had the same fancy fifteen hundred years before him, and that matters had nevertheless gone on much as they had always done, without the day of judgment having dawned. Calvin with his educated understanding and his experience of the world, ought to have seen Servetus as the pious enthusiast he was in fact, and not as the enemy of God and Religion, as well as of himself. Failing to cure him of his extravagant fancies, he might safely have left him to indulge them, as being little likely to compromise his own or any other system of Christianity, the Papacy perhaps excepted, to which the would-be Restorer was truly much more violently opposed than the Reformer. But hate had blinded Calvin; considerations personal to himself had complicated and in some sort superseded such as were associated with religion.