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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Charles Despeville.

[Geneva] ‘this 13 of February, 1546.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the subject of Faith, to which Calvin’s system gave much less free play than Luther’s, we find Servetus siding with him of the North rather than him of the South. Neither of them, however, as we have seen, had any conception of faith in the way Servetus understood it. Faith, says he, consists in a certain compliant state of mind, proclaimed by unquestioning assent. This, the true saving faith, is of the kind avowed by Peter when he declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yet faith even of this kind, distinctly as it has the lead in Servetus’s Christology, is not yet all in all: to become efficient or saving, it must be conjoined with Charity. ‘If faith be not clothed with charity,’ says he, ‘it dies in nakedness; and as habit is strengthened by action, the body by exercise, and the understanding by study, so is faith strengthened by good works.’ The subject-will and fatalism, asserted by Calvin in his doctrine of predestination and election, have therefore no real foundation in Scripture; nay more, there is unreason in the assumption of such a principle, and in the admonition given to mankind to do that which it must be known beforehand they cannot do. ‘You speak,’ says our writer, ‘of free acts, yet really say that there is no such thing as free action. But who so devoid of understanding as to prescribe free choice to one incapable of choosing freely! It is mere fatuity besides to derive subject-will from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us; but in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will, choose, determine, and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all things proceed essentially from him. The Spirit of God is innate in man, and as the power to do is one thing, so is the necessity to do another. Although God elects us as the potter does his clay, it by no means follows that we are nothing more than clay. Paul’s simile deceives you; it is not universally applicable.’

The Law of Moses, Calvin has said, is still in force and to be observed by us as truly as it was by the Jews; violating it, he says, we violate the Law of God. Servetus’s reply to this is the burden of the Twenty-third and three following Letters. ‘I fancy I hear some Jew or Mussulman speaking here,’ says our respondent. ‘But to what is violence done—is it to a stone, or to certain letters cut in a stone? Christ, I say, accomplished the Law and then it was abrogated; in him we have the New Covenant, the Old superseded; in him are we made free. The law of Moses was unbearable; it slew the soul, it increased sin, it begat anger; virtue itself through it became at times transgression, and in compassion for our frailty it was annulled. You make God exercise a rude and miserable people in a mill-round. What would you say were some tyrant to require mountains of gold or the stars of heaven from your Genevese, and threaten them with death for non-compliance with his demands? But the Old Law bound men to impossibilities. Art thou not then ashamed of slavery and tyrannical violence? Insisting on the observance of this law, you yet go on dreaming with your Luther, and saying that no one ever entirely fulfilled the commandment which says “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and soul.” David and others, then, who said that they sought God with all their heart and strove with all their might to keep his commandments, are but liars to you. And what, after all, are the laws of Moses? If conformable to Nature then are they the laws of God, the author of Nature, older than Moses, and to be observed of Christians independently of Moses. But God never required obedience of the kind you imagined; he but asks of each according to his strength. Cease then, O Calvin, to torture us with the law of Moses, and to insist on its observance. It looks as if you had a mind to be pitied of God in your impotency—of God who may be said so often to have had to take pity on the Jews when they were under the law.’ Who shall say that Michael Servetus was not in advance of John Calvin?

The twenty-seventh, eighth, and ninth epistles are only significant as expositions of doctrinal views in their bearing on social life. Is it lawful, he asks, for a Christian to assume the magistracy? to administer the laws of the land and to take the lives of evil-doers? Of course it is. The order of the world is maintained by law and justice. But then to take life? Where there is hope of amendment, as in the case of the woman taken in adultery, we see the penalty of death remitted: Go, said Jesus to her, and sin no more. But even where there is malice and unyielding obstinacy, recourse is to be had to chastisement of other kinds than taking life. Among these, banishment, approved by Christ, and excommunication, practised by the Church, are to be commended. Schism and heresy were punished in this way whilst traces of apostolic tradition remained. Criminals, in matters not pertaining to the faith, are variously punished by the laws of every country; and this is in conformity with natural law. They bear the sword aright and lawfully who bear it in the cause of justice and to the repression of crime; and it is not against gospel precepts that we serve as soldiers in defence of our lives and possessions.

Servetus, we find, accords rather extensive powers to Bishops, whom, in opposition to Calvin, he recognises, and to Ministers of the Church generally. Bishops, like good shepherds, are to know their flocks, and to take care that no infection gets in among them; ministers again—he does not use the word priests—are privileged to reconcile sinners to God, and to punish unbelievers by excommunicating them and delivering them over to Satan and spiritual death. Their authority, however, is only to be exercised under the guidance of the Spirit—what spirit he does not say. Confession, too, he approves of, but the minister is not to be consulted save in case of some grave doubt or difficulty arising.

Our writer is greatly displeased with Calvin’s interpretation of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in which like wages are given to those hired at every hour of the day; from which the Reformer infers that there is no difference or distinction in glory, in faith, or in works. ‘To you truly,’ says Servetus, ‘there needs no distinction as to less or more; for with you these are all alike of non-avail, some as you maintain being saved with, as some are saved without, merit of their own. But it is faith that of the impious makes the pious, of the dead the living. Ignorant of all gospel truth is he who does not attach supreme significance to faith in Christ as the Son of God.’

The concluding epistle of the series must have given great offence to Calvin, the writer reproaching him with setting the Christian on no higher level than the vulgar Jew. ‘They are alike to you, indeed, alike carnal, because to you are the benefits of Christ’s coming unknown; to you who in the Supper partake of nothing more than a trope or figure, and who treat baptism as the equivalent of a Levitical rite, the sign of a thing that is not. But in the Supper we, nourished by immortal food, for a terrestrial have a new celestial life imparted to us, and how should he perish who has once partaken of Christ? May God give you to receive all these things with a true understanding, led by the spirit of truth, by Jesus Christ and the Father. Amen.’ Scouting the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, as he did, we here find Servetus speaking as if he believed that it was the body of Christ indeed that was partaken of in the Supper! To understand this in him his pantheistic notions must again be taken into account. But pantheism, when not detached from the idea of personality, in the usual acceptation of the word, leads inevitably to such absurdity. Speaking as he does now, Servetus forgets his philosophy and yields himself up to his mysticism. With as much justice might he have said that Cannibals partake of God when they eat one another, as that the Christian communicant partakes of Christ when he joins the simple, solemn, commemorative feast.