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

It fell out, unfortunately for Servetus, that the decree of the Council against the Consistory was the immediate prelude to the resumption of his trial. The decision come to had been warmly contested by Calvin, as we see by the preceding letter, he looking on any interference of the civil magistrate in questions which he regarded from a purely ecclesiastical point of view, as a blow not only to his spiritual authority in Geneva, but to the cause of religion. He saw the late awards of the Council in favour of Berthelier and against the Consistory in the light of triumphs of his enemies over himself, and mainly due to the influence of his particular opponent, Amied Perrin, under whose presidency the adverse decisions had been obtained.

On the resumption of the Servetus trial, then, the hot blood engendered by the recent struggle had not yet had time to cool; and Calvin, on taking his place in the reconstituted Criminal Court, found himself once more not only face to face with his theological opponent, but set beside his chief political enemies, Perrin and Berthelier. Elate with the advantage just gained, they had kept their seats on the Bench, intending doubtless to do what in them lay to secure a further victory through Michael Servetus over the uncompromising Reformer. It is not difficult to imagine the influence, in the present state of affairs, which the attitude of these men had on the fate of our unhappy Servetus; for Calvin, with his many supporters acting as his spies, was well informed of the countenance they had given the prisoner privately, and seems to have construed their presence at this particular moment as a public demonstration in his favour. To convict Servetus was therefore to thwart them, and the discomfiture of the solitary stranger had become more than ever a personal and political necessity to the Reformer.

The articles from the works of Servetus from the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ exclusively, on this occasion, thirty-eight in number, had been laid before the Court so long back as September 1, and are headed: ‘Opinions or Propositions taken from the Books of Michael Servetus which the Members of the Church of Geneva declare to be in part impious and blasphemous, in part full of profound errors and absurdities, all of them alike opposed to the Word of God and the orthodox assent of the Church.’

September 15.—The Court constituted in the usual manner, with Servetus before them sworn to speak the truth, Calvin, who seems now to have taken the place of the Attorney-General, proceeded to interrogate the prisoner on the new Articles of Impeachment. One of the first of these, referring to the relationship of the Son to the Father in the mystery of the Trinity, appears to have given rise to another long, and we may imagine excited debate between Calvin and the prisoner; from which, however, the judges were able to gather so little light that they interposed, and came to a resolution to have any further discussion that might arise carried on in writing and in the Latin tongue, instead of by word of mouth and in French as heretofore.

The substitution of Latin for French had in fact become a necessity when the determination to consult the other Reformed Churches of the Confederation was adopted. Native to Geneva with its French-speaking population, French was little understood at Berne, Basle, ZÜrich, and Schaffhausen with their German inhabitants; but the liberally educated among them were generally familiar with Latin. Calvin, we must therefore presume, had presented his new Articles in French, so that they had to be translated and turned back into Latin; but the trial appears to have suffered no particular delay on this account. Presented anew in the Latin tongue and approved by the Court, they were ordered by it to be submitted to the prisoner, with the intimation that he was required to answer them, and to feel himself at liberty to alter or retract anything he might now think he had written unadvisedly; to explain anything he had said that was misunderstood; and to defend such of his opinions as were challenged, by the citation of Scripture in their support. Nor was he to be hurried in sending in his replies; he was to take his own time, and to enter as fully as he pleased into every question.

As it is part of our business here to learn on what grounds men of the highest culture burned one another to death three hundred and twenty-four years ago—and it is thought by some that there still remains such an amount of ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance in the world as might lead to a rekindling of the fires, were the power to do so but added to the will—we feel bound to make a somewhat particular study of the Articles on which the unfortunate Servetus was finally incriminated and doomed to die. We therefore proceed to lay before the reader, in slightly condensed form, these Articles, which will be seen, on the most cursory perusal, to involve none but topics of transcendental dogmatic theology—a subject which to reasonable men has now lost almost all the significance it once possessed, but which has still a large historical interest as showing, in contrast with present views, the progress that has been made from darkness into light; and as illustrating the great, yet persistently neglected, truth, that the religious feelings are no safe guides of conduct when dissevered from the other emotional elements of human nature in balanced action among themselves, enlightened by science and associated with reason. Religion has in fact at no time been the civiliser of mankind, as so commonly said, but has itself been the civilised through advances made in science or the knowledge of nature, and in general refinement. Brutal and blood-stained among savages and the barbarous but policied peoples of antiquity, Assyrians, ChaldÆans, Egyptians, Hebrews; cruel and intolerant among Newer Nations well advanced in art and letters, but ignorant of the world they lived in and the universe around them, religion has only become humane as Science has been suffered to shed her ennobling light, and will first prove truly beneficent when Piety is seen to consist in study of the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, and Worship is acknowledged to be comprised in reverential observance of their behests. What adequate idea of God could be formed—if, indeed, it be possible for man to form any adequate idea of God!—so long as this earth—this mote in the ocean of Infinity—was thought of as the centre of the universe, the one object of God’s care, and a single family among the myriads that people it as the sole recipients of his revealed word and will!

But turn we to our Articles, which we proceed to pass under review in connection with the answers made to them by Servetus. In these we shall now find him more intemperate than he has yet shown himself; more aggressive, too; not only indisposed to yield in jot or tittle, but negligent of opportunities to defend his conclusions, and eager to attack his pursuer; ready to call him opprobrious names, and to charge him with wilful misrepresentation and malignity. The recent triumph of Perrin and Berthelier had obviously infected Servetus, and not only lost him his chance of continuing to improve his position with his judges, but even made him careless of making any serious effort to prove himself in the right.

At the very outset of his replies, and by way of preface, assuming the Articles to be Calvin’s and Calvin’s alone, Servetus says: ‘It is impossible not to admire the impudence of the man, who is nothing less than a disciple of Simon Magus, arrogating to himself the authority of a Doctor of the Sorbonne, condemning everything according to his fancy, scarcely quoting Scripture for aught he advances, and either plainly not understanding me or artfully wresting my words from their true significance. I am therefore compelled, before replying to his Articles, to say, in brief, that the whole purpose of my book is to show, first, that when the word Son is met with in Scripture it is always to the man Jesus that the term is applied, he having also the title Christ given him; and, second, that the Son or second Person in the Trinity is spoken of as a person because there was visibly relucent in the Deity a Representation or Image of the man Jesus Christ, hypostatically subsisting in the Divine mind from eternity. It is because this rationale of the Person is unknown to Calvin, and because the whole thing depends thereon, that I refer as preliminary to certain passages from the ancient Doctors of the Church on which I rest my conclusions.’

Passages sixteen in number, from Tertullian, IrenÆus, Clemens Romanus, and others, are then cited to justify the sense he attaches to the words Person and Son; from which we see that Servetus, following his authorities, adopts the Neo-platonic view of the Son as a pre-existing idea in the Divine mind, not as an entity distinct from the essence of God, having a proper life and subsistence of its own, and only proceeding in time to become incarnate in the man Jesus.

We were interested, of course, in referring to these passages from the Fathers (they are given at length in Calvin’s Refutation); and, though disappointed in finding them less cogent and conclusive than we had expected, we yet discover the germs of almost all that is more fully developed by Servetus in connection with the subjects of which they speak. ‘Tertullian,’ says he, ‘declares, that to conform with things human, God, in former times, assumed human senses and affections, and made himself visible to man in the divinity of Christ; and that the words Person and Son of God are used in Scripture because God, invisible, intangible in himself, was made visible in Christ. He who spoke with Adam in the garden, with Noah, with Abraham, and came down to see what the Babylonians were about, and so on, was no other than Christ or a prefiguration of Christ. He who spoke with Moses, too, at different times was Christ—the Relucent visible Image or Figuration of the invisible Deity. In the essence of God there is no real distinction between the Father and the Son; they do not constitute two invisible entities such as the Tritheiti imagine; it is no more than a formal distinction that is made between the invisible Father and the visible Son. It is the idea of prolation or procession of one thing out of another that has given occasion to certain dispositions, dispensations, or modes in the Deity being turned into so many entities, and so into a Trinity of Persons. Quoting St. Paul, Tertullian says that “in the face of Christ is seen the very light of God;” and to this I myself refer repeatedly in my Third Book on the Trinity; but Calvin, persisting in his blindness, will not see God thus.’

From IrenÆus we find little that is not repetition of what is said by Tertullian. ‘The Jews,’ he says, ‘did not know that he who spoke with Adam and Abraham and Moses in human form, was the Word, the Son of God. But Jesus, as the Image, as the Word, was then the Divine manifestation of God, being at once, but without real distinction, both Word and Spirit; for in the spiritual substance of the Father was comprised the figuration and representation of the Word. Abraham was taught and knew that the Angel who visited him was the representative of the Word which was, or was to be, the future man, the Son of God—dost hear, Calvin?—the Word was the figuration of the man Jesus! The Word is always spoken of as something visible; so that when John says, “In the beginning was the Word,” we are to understand the prefiguration of Christ in the Deity: invisible in himself, God the Father is visible in the Son. The Logos and the Spirit imply nothing of personal distinction in God so that, when it is said, “God made all things by his Word,” it is himself as Creator, and not another, that is to be understood: the Word and the Holy Ghost are not to be thought of as distinct entities, but as dispositions in God.’

But enough of this—more than enough, indeed, is before the reader to enable him to judge of the kind of matter that never yet influenced man in his conduct towards either God or his fellow, on which Michael Servetus was adjudged to die.

The answers of Servetus to the incriminated passages of his book are obviously by no means either so full or so satisfactory as he might easily have made them; neither are they always so worded as unequivocally to express his proper views; but of more moment than all, they are given without the references to Scripture which the Court had suggested, and would certainly have had greater weight with it than aught else that could be urged. Though he uses the words person and hypostasis, we know that he did not understand them in the same way as theologians generally. He did not acknowledge any proper personality in the nature of God, who to him was invisible, all-pervading Essence, inscrutable too, save as manifesting and making himself known in Creation. Servetus’s persons and hypostases are modes or manifestations of God in nature, and, not limited to three, are, in truth, infinite in number, and proclaimed in an infinity of ways. To accommodate himself in some sort to such conceptions as were current on the subject of the Trinity, he uses language at times which it seems might fairly bring him within the pale of orthodoxy, were we not aware of the arbitrary meaning he attaches to the terms employed: God, Father, all-pervading Being; Christ, Son, visible manifestation of God to man; Holy Ghost, Angel—?????e?a, actuating force in nature. Such, as we understand him, was the kind of Trinity formulated by Servetus.

The answers of the prisoner to the new articles of incrimination were now ordered by the Court, which has nothing to say to them itself, to be put into the hands of the Reformer for his strictures. This gave Calvin the opportunity which he did not fail to turn to the best advantage. Treating Servetus’s Replies in a very different spirit from that in which the Spaniard had treated his Articles, he proceeded elaborately to criticise and refute them; in other words, and more properly, to demonstrate the incongruity and incompatibility of Servetus’s admitted beliefs and opinions touching the transcendental propositions involved, with the orthodox conclusions of himself and the Churches generally. To a theologian like Calvin such a task presented no difficulties; but the thoroughness of his exposition or refutation, and the length to which it runs, assure us of the pains he bestowed on the work. Calvin is said to have spent no more than two or three days in the composition of this elaborate paper; had the time been two months and more, it would have been little, and few men, we apprehend, could have got through the work in less time.

Signed by as many as thirteen ministers beside himself—for Calvin would not forego the backing of his colleagues in such a cause—the Refutation of the prisoner’s replies to his prosecutor’s Articles of Inculpation was laid before the Court at their next meeting; and in a spirit of entire judicial fairness, was by them ordered to be forthwith submitted to the prisoner, for his observations in assent to, or dissent from, the interpretations put upon his words. He was even particularly told, as he had been before, that he was at liberty to answer in the way and at the length he pleased.

The understanding of the Court when giving Calvin his instructions, was that his Extracts were not to be accompanied by either note or comment—they were to be ‘word for word’ from the writings of the prisoner. But we see that he gave little heed to this injunction; for many of the Articles are either prefaced or concluded by a comment; Art. XVI. for example, begins in this way: ‘That he may corrupt the saying of the apostle,’ &c.; XVII.: ‘To say that God is Father of the Holy Ghost, is to confound the persons,’ &c.; XVIII.: ‘To show that he plays with the word person,’ &c.; XXXV.: ‘After jumbling together many insane and pernicious notions on the substance of the soul,’ &c.; XXXVIII.: ‘That he has written and published horrible blasphemies against the baptism of infants,’ &c. Calvin, in short, could not resist the opportunity of helping the Judges to a conclusion in consonance with his own views, and therefore adverse to those of his opponent.

When we turn to Calvin’s Refutation of the Errors of Michael Servetus, we observe him setting out by saying that he will not imitate the prisoner in the use of uncivil language, but confine himself strictly to the matters in question. He would not be John Calvin, however, did he keep his word; and truly his language is at times little less offensive than that of Servetus; whilst his comments, uniformly adverse, are ever studiously calculated to damage the prisoner in the eyes of his Judges. ‘Whosoever,’ says Calvin in concluding his work, ‘will duly weigh all that is here adduced, will not fail to see that the whole purpose of Servetus has been to extinguish the light we have in the true doctrine, and so put an end to all religion.’ But we, for our part, say, after some pains bestowed, that whoever peruses the writings of Servetus without a foregone conclusion that any one among the various formulated systems of religious doctrine he sees around him is the Absolute Truth, and alone essential to constitute Religiousness, will not fail to discover that not only had Servetus no thought of putting out the light of religion in the world, but that he was animated by a most earnest desire, through another interpretation of the Records which he, too, looked on as Revelations from God, to set Christianity on another, and, as he believed, a better foundation than it had yet obtained from the labours of Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the Reformers. Servetus was, in truth, but one among the host of Reformers of every shade and colour who made their appearance on the field at the trumpet-call of Luther, and who had but this in common: hostility to the ignorance and immorality of monk and priest, to the pride and lust and abuse of power so conspicuous in Pope and Roman Hierarch. And shall we in these days think of him as impious and irreligious who held that it was less than reasonable to speak of the coeternity of a Father and a Son, taking the words in any common-sense acceptation; and that a single entity could not be conceived as subdivided into three distinct entities or persons, without loss of its essential unity, nor three distinct entities or persons be thought of as amalgamated into one without loss of their several individualities? Who said, moreover, that he believed God to be the all-pervading essence and order of the universe; man to be fitted for his state, each individually answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another, and that faith in the highest exemplar of humanity as he conceived it, that had ever appeared on earth, added to a good life and its associate charities, was that which was required for salvation? Shall we, we ask, think of such a man as less pious, less religious, less likely to be acceptable to God than one who believed that there was a certain Word which was with God from the beginning, and was indeed God, and yet another than God; or that God, beside his proper all-sufficing substance, was supplemented by several hypostases or offsets, which were at once himself, yet other than himself; that from eternity God had elected and fore-ordained a relatively limited proportion of mankind to salvation and eternal life, and doomed an infinitely larger proportion to perdition and everlasting death? Shall we, we say further, think that the man who was tolerant of the speculative opinions of others, and whose business in life it was to visit the sick and reach the healing potion, was less of a good, and a true, and a useful member of society, than he who aspired through the unseen, the unknown and the unknowable, to rule the world with a rod of iron, who was utterly intolerant of other speculative opinions than his own, and in enforcing his arbitrary rules for the regulation of life and conversation, was merciless in the use of the scourge, the branding iron, the sword, and the slow fire? Surely we shall not. Were greatness associated in the world with true nobility of nature, light-bringers, like Michael Servetus, would assuredly be set on a higher level than conquerors of kingdoms.