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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.

[Illustration: 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., Londo
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 THE FIRST._

  EARLY LIFE--WORKS--ARREST AND TRIAL AT VIENNE.

  CHAPTER      PAGE

  I. MICHAEL SERVETUS: HIS BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY EDUCATION       3

  II. SERVICE WITH FRIAR JUAN QUINTANA, CONFESSOR OF THE EMPEROR
        CHARLES V.                                                    19

  III. THE SERVICE WITH QUINTANA COMES TO AN END                      29

  IV. INTERCOURSE WITH THE SWISS REFORMERS                            33

  V. THE REFORMERS OF STRASBURG. PUBLICATION OF THE WORK ON
        TRINITARIAN ERROR                                             37

  VI. THE AUTHORITIES OF BASLE. THE TWO DIALOGUES ON THE TRINITY.
        LEAVES SWITZERLAND                                            71

  VII. PARIS. ASSUMPTION OF THE NAME OF VILLENEUVE OR VILLANOVANUS.
        ACQUAINTANCE WITH CALVIN                                      79

  VIII. LYONS. ENGAGEMENT AS READER FOR THE PRESS WITH THE
        TRECHSELS. EDITS THE GEOGRAPHY OF PTOLEMY                     86

  IX. LYONS. DR. SYMPHORIEN CHAMPIER                                  99

  X. RETURN TO PARIS. STUDIES THERE. JO. WINTER OF ANDERNACH;
        ANDREA VESALIUS. DEGREES OF M.A. AND M.D. LECTURES ON
        GEOGRAPHY AND ASTROLOGY                                      104

  XI. THE TREATISE ON SYRUPS, AND THEIR USE IN MEDICINE              111

  XII. THE MEDICAL FACULTY OF PARIS SUE SERVETUS FOR LECTURING
        ON JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY                                        116

  XIII. CHARLIEU. ATTAINMENT OF HIS THIRTIETH YEAR. VIEWS OF
        BAPTISM                                                      125

  XIV. SETTLEMENT AT VIENNE UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP.
        RENEWAL OF INTERCOURSE WITH THE PUBLISHERS OF LYONS.
        SECOND EDITION OF PTOLEMY                                    130

  XV. EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI’S LATIN BIBLE WITH COMMENTARY        139

  XVI. ENGAGEMENT AS EDITOR BY JO. FRELON OF LYONS. CORRESPONDENCE
        WITH CALVIN                                                  157

  XVII. ‘CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO,’ THE RESTORATION OF
        CHRISTIANITY. DISCOVERY OF THE PULMONARY CIRCULATION         191

  XVIII. CALVIN RECEIVES A COPY OF THE ‘CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO’    231

  XIX. CALVIN DENOUNCES SERVETUS THROUGH WILLIAM TRIE TO THE
        ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITIES OF LYONS                          235

  XX. ARREST OF SERVETUS AND ARNOULLET, THE PUBLISHER. THE TRIAL
        FOR HERESY AT VIENNE. SERVETUS IS SUFFERED TO ESCAPE FROM
        PRISON                                                       252

  XXI. DISCOVERY OF ARNOULLET’S PRIVATE PRINTING ESTABLISHMENT.
       SEIZURE AND BURNING OF THE ‘CHRISTIANISMI
       RESTITUTIO,’ ALONG WITH THE EFFIGY OF ITS AUTHOR              269

  _BOOK THE SECOND._

  SERVETUS IN GENEVA, FACE TO FACE WITH CALVIN.

  I. SERVETUS REACHES GENEVA. DETAINED THERE, HE IS ARRESTED AT
        THE INSTANCE OF CALVIN                                       281

  II. GENEVA, AND THE STATE OF POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE DATE OF
        SERVETUS’ ARREST                                             287

  III. SERVETUS IS ARRAIGNED ON THE CAPITAL CHARGE BY CALVIN         304

  IV. THE TRIAL IN ITS FIRST PHASE                                   314

  V. THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE, WITH THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL
       OF GENEVA AS PROSECUTOR                                       333

  VI. THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE, CONTINUED                       351

  VII. THE TRIAL CONTINUED. THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL RECEIVES
       FRESH INSTRUCTIONS FROM CALVIN                                366

  VIII. SERVETUS IS VISITED IN PRISON BY CALVIN AND THE
       MINISTERS                                                     386

  IX. THE COURT DETERMINES TO CONSULT THE COUNCILS
       AND CHURCHES OF THE FOUR PROTESTANT SWISS CANTONS             391

  X. THE TRIAL IS INTERRUPTED THROUGH DIFFERENCES
       BETWEEN CALVIN AND THE COUNCIL                                393

  XI. THE TRIAL IS RESUMED ON NEW ARTICLES SUPPLIED BY CALVIN        398

  XII. THE TRIAL CONTINUED. SERVETUS ADDRESSES A
       LETTER TO CALVIN AND PETITIONS HIS JUDGES                     423

  XIII. CALVIN ANTICIPATES THE JUDGES IN THEIR APPEAL
       TO THE SWISS CHURCHES                                         428

  XIV. SERVETUS SENDS A LETTER AND A SECOND REMONSTRANCE
       AND PETITION TO HIS JUDGES                                    441

  XV. THE SWISS COUNCILS AND CHURCHES ARE ADDRESSED
       BY THE COUNCIL OF GENEVA                                      446

  XVI. SERVETUS AGAIN ADDRESSES THE SYNDICS AND COUNCIL
       OF GENEVA, AND ACCUSES CALVIN. THE
       ANSWERS OF THE COUNCILS AND CHURCHES CONSULTED                450

  XVII. THE ATTITUDE OF CALVIN. THE HOPES OF SERVETUS                474

  XVIII. THE SENTENCE AND EXECUTION. VÆ VICTIS!                      480

  XIX. AFTER THE BATTLE. VÆ VICTORIBUS!                              488

  XX. CALVIN DEFENDS HIMSELF                                         498

  XXI. CALVIN’S DEFENCE IS ATTACKED                                  517

  XXII. CALVIN’S BIOGRAPHERS AND APOLOGISTS                          528

  APPENDIX                                                           535

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