SERVETUS IS VISITED IN PRISON BY CALVIN AND THE MINISTERS.

We have seen symptoms of something like a leaning of the Court towards the prisoner. They had requested Calvin and others of the Clergy to visit and confer with him, and do their best to bring him to what all regarded as a better understanding; and it would appear that immediately after the last sitting, Calvin, accompanied by several Ministers, proceeded to the gaol and had an interview with the prisoner. Calvin of course was the spokesman, and opened upon him with an address in which he strove to show him not only the load of error under which he laboured in his exposition of Scripture generally, but the grave offence he had committed in attacking the particular dogma of the Trinity, as interpreted by the Churches, and in calling all who believed in it Tritheists and even Atheists.

From what we already know we may divine how little a visit from John Calvin with such an exordium was likely to lead to any satisfactory conclusion; Servetus appears at first, indeed, to have declined even to hear his visitors: he was too much oppressed by sorrow, sickness, and long confinement, he said, to enter on any defence of his views, and a prison was no fit place for theological discussion.

Stern, bigoted, and uncompromising as he was by nature, Calvin would have been false to his calling as a Minister had he not striven, though thus encountered, to bring even a personal enemy to what he believed to be proper thoughts of the Trinity, the nature of the Logos and the Sonship of Christ; and we do not question his will and inclination to do so; but in Servetus Calvin saw the man who had insulted and so had mortally offended him, whilst in Calvin, Servetus beheld the individual who so lately, by underhand means and the violation of his confidential correspondence, had wrecked his fortunes and sought his life; the man, moreover, at whose instance he was now in prison and subjected to what he rightfully regarded as unworthy usage and an unauthorised and unjust trial.

We can but excuse the irritation that mastered Servetus now, and lament that with Berthelier’s disastrous countenance misleading him, he neglected the chance that was undoubtedly offered him to save his life, had it been but by a show of moderation and conciliatory bearing. Calvin, however, must have persevered for a while with the unfortunate physician, and brought him to reply to more than one of the principles of his system produced against him. Among others, we find him reported as maintaining that wherever the word Son is met with in the Scriptures, it is the man Jesus that is to be understood; and when Christ is spoken of as the Word and the Eternal Son, the language is to be taken in a potential not in an actual sense; neither Light, Logos, nor Son having existed otherwise than in the mind of God before creation; the actual or real Son in particular having only begun to be when engendered in the womb of the Virgin Mary—and so on, the discourse turning upon matters transcending man’s power to know, and falling wholly within the domain of faith or belief. On the last topic brought under review, Servetus from the beginning of his career was always empathic. ‘Si unum iota mihi ostendas quo Verbum illud Filius vocetur, aut de Verbi generatione fiat mentio, fatebor me devictum. Ubi Scriptura dicit Verbum, dicit et ipse Verbum; ubi Filius, Filius; scilicet: olim Verbum, nunc vero Filius.’ These are his words in his earliest work, and from their tenor he never swerved.91

The interview ended as we may imagine it could only end—with increased irritation on the part of the Ministers at the obstinate self-will of the heretic, as they interpreted it, and without a ray of new light having made its way into the mind either of the prisoner or his visitors. His would-be enlighteners, however—he thinking that they stood much in need of enlightenment from him—were particular, before taking their leave, in insisting on the right of the temporal power in the state to repress and punish theological error. Heretics, as they said, being liable by the Justinian Code, still in force over Europe, to be proceeded against and punished as criminals; and he having, in a highly objectionable manner, attacked many among the most sacred of the divine ordinances, would have no reason to complain did he find himself dealt with in the severest fashion as a blasphemer of the Church of God, and disturber of the peace of Christendom.

But neither, as we may imagine, were the words of the deputation in this direction found of any avail in leading the prisoner to their views. Civil tribunals, he maintained, were utterly incompetent in matters of faith, and had no right of the sword in cases of imputed heresy. The Code of Justinian was in truth no authority, having been compiled in times when the Church had already lapsed from its original purity. The violent repressive measures it sanctioned were wholly unknown to the Apostles and their immediate successors. Besides all this, he held the Church of Geneva to be specially precluded from giving an opinion or pronouncing a judgment upon his views; his opponent and personal enemy, Calvin, wielding such paramount authority there, as to make him in fact and in himself the Church. How little all this, however true (and all the less, perhaps, because true), was calculated to win either Calvin or his followers to more friendly feelings, may be imagined; but it shows us the brave, consistent, conscientious, religious man, face to face with fate, and a proffered opportunity to conciliate and save his life, abiding by his convictions, and, with the warning but just given him, rather than belie himself, verily courting death. What would have happened had Galileo been as conscientious and firm as Servetus?