‘CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO’—THE RESTORATION OF CHRISTIANITY—DISCOVERY OF THE PULMONARY CIRCULATION.

We have seen that Servetus could never recover his MS. of the Restoration of Christianity from the hands of Calvin. But he had not sent his work for the review of the Reformer without retaining a copy for himself, and this he determined now to have printed and sent abroad into the world. With this view he forwarded the Manuscript to a publisher of Basle, Marrinus by name, with whom—if we may infer so much from the address of the publisher’s letter to him declining the work—he must have been on terms of intimacy. Marrinus’s letter is short, to the point, and in the following terms:—

‘Gratia et pax a Deo, Michael carissime!—the grace and peace of God be with you, dearest Michael! I have received your letter and your book; but I fancy that on reflection you will see why it cannot be published at Basle at this present time. When I have perused it [more carefully] I shall therefore return it to you by the accredited messenger you may send for it. But I beg you not to question my friendly feelings towards you. To what you say besides I shall reply at greater length and more particularly on another occasion. Farewell! Thy

Marrinus.
‘Basle, April 9, 1552.’

The MS., even on a cursory perusal, had evidently frightened the worthy publisher of Basle: he would have nothing to do with it; but this did not put our author from his purpose of publication. Not going so far afield as Basle, he took Balthasar Arnoullet, bookseller and publisher, and William Geroult, manager of his printing establishment, both of Vienne, into his confidence, giving them to understand that though the book he wished to have printed was against the doctrines of Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and other heretics, there were many reasons why neither his name as the author, nor Vienne as the place of publication, should appear on the title-page.

Arnoullet, like Marrinus, must have had misgivings about the reception the book was likely to meet with from the clergy of France, and, aware of the danger he incurred who printed and published aught out of conformity with the doctrines of the holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, he too must have declined in the first instance to undertake the work. But Michel Villeneuve had been prosperous; he had money in his purse, and engaging not only to take the whole of the expenses on himself, but to add a gratuity of 100 crowns to the cost, Arnoullet consented at last to run the risk of publication, meaning, however, that the world at large should know nothing of him as instrumental in the business. No one then knew that Secerius of Hagenau had printed the ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ or that its author, Michael Servetus, was Doctor Villeneuve. Why should it ever transpire that Balthasar Arnoullet of Vienne had printed the ‘Restitutio Christianismi,’ or that Monsieur Michel Villeneuve the physician was its writer? To keep the secret within their own circle, therefore, the work must not be composed in the usual place of business, and none but the most indispensable hands be employed upon it. A small house, away from the known printing establishment, was accordingly taken; type cases and a press were there set up, and the work once entered on proceeded regularly without interruption during a period of between three and four months, when the impression, consisting of 1,000 copies, was successfully worked off.

Arnoullet, although we shall by and by find him declaring his entire ignorance of the burden of the book, and charging his manager, Geroult, with having deceived him on this head and by misrepresentations induced him to meddle with the publication at all, must nevertheless have been well aware of its nature. The measures taken to keep the outside world in ignorance of what was going on, the arrangement with the author to be his own reader for press, and the premium paid, give the lie to all his asseverations. Servetus, too, in his determination to keep his name from the title-page, and leave this blank of the place of publication, shows that neither was he blind to the danger that waited on the production of such a book as the Restoration of Christianity in Roman Catholic France. The printing press, though eagerly welcomed on all hands at first, soon fell out of favour with the Church of Rome, and so continues with that conspiracy against the rights, the liberties, and the progress of mankind. But Michael Servetus was too vain, too thoroughly persuaded of his own apostolic mission to the world, to leave his book, the crowning labour of his life, without some sufficient mark of its paternity. On the last page, accordingly, we find the initials of his name and designation in capital letters, thus, M.S.V., immediately over the date MDLIII., the year of the intended publication. But even so much was not wanted to proclaim the author. Innocently or inadvertently he says in his Preface that he had formerly treated briefly of the subjects he is now about to discuss at greater length; and in the body of the work he may even be said to make his appearance in person, and in his proper name; for we there have Michael and Peter as interlocutors, precisely as in the old ‘Dialogi ij de Trinitate’ of the year 1532.

Printed with every precaution to secure secrecy, with nothing intentionally about it to lead the uninitiated to suspect what was meant by the M.S.V. at the end, or a hint, even had it been divined that Michael Servetus Villanovanus was thereby indicated, to show that he and Michel Villeneuve of Vienne were one and the same personage, it is obvious that the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ was not intended for publication or sale either in Vienne or France—probably not even in Basle or Geneva, in the first instance. Villeneuve would keep the place where he lived, and the country that sheltered him, as well as the nearest neighbouring land, out of the storm which he plainly foresaw would be raised by his daring innovations on accredited Christian doctrine, and his more than Luther-like denunciations of the Papacy. The whole impression was therefore made up into bales of 100 copies in each, of which five were confided to the safe keeping of Pierre Merrin, typefounder of Lyons—a brother in all likelihood of the Marrinus of Basle, with whose name we are already acquainted—in view of their being forwarded by water to Genoa and Venice. A bale or two we know were sent by Arnoullet to his agent at Frankfort; and as Frelon was now in the secret of Servetus, we can hardly doubt of his having taken some share in the venture and despatched at least a bale to the same great emporium of the book trade. It must have been from Frelon, indeed, that Calvin by and by obtained the couple of copies of the ‘Restitutio’ he required for the purposes of the prosecution he had instituted against its author; and it is almost certainly to him, not to Robert Etienne, the bookseller of Geneva, as has been said, that Calvin refers in his letter to the Frankfort Clergy ‘as a well-disposed person who will put no obstacle in the way of the seizure and destruction of the obnoxious book which he has learned had been sent for exposition and sale among them.’ The remainder of the impression—and there could now have been little of it left on hand—for safe stowage away from the Archiepiscopal city of Vienne, was confided by Arnoullet to the custody of a friend, Bertet by name, resident at Chatillon.59

The book on the ‘Restoration of Christianity,’60 often spoken of, though so rare as seldom to be seen, comprises a series of disquisitions on the speculative and practical principles of Christianity, as apprehended by the author; thirty letters to John Calvin; a disquisition on as many as sixty signs of the reign of Antichrist, and an apologetic address to Philip Melanchthon and his followers.

‘The task we have set ourselves here,’ says the Author in his Preface or Introduction, ‘is truly sublime; for it is no less than to make God known in his substantial manifestation by The Word and his divine communication by the Spirit, both comprised in Christ, through whom alone do we learn how the divineness of the Word and the Spirit may be apprehended in Man. Hidden from human sight in former times, God is now both manifested and communicated to the world, manifestation taking place by the Word, communication by the Spirit, to the end that we may see him face to face as it were in Creation, and feel him intuitively but lucidly declared in ourselves. It is high time that the door leading to knowledge of this kind were opened; for otherwise no one can either know God truly, read the Scriptures aright, or be a Christian.’

How much the writer is in earnest is farther proclaimed by the Invocation to Christ and the Address to the Reader with which he concludes his Introduction: ‘O Christ Jesus, Son of God, Thou Who wast given to us from heaven, Thou Who in Thyself makest Deity visibly manifest, I, Thy servant, now proclaim Thee, that so great a manifestation may be made known to all. Grant then to Thy petitioner Thy good Spirit and Thy effectual Speech; guide Thou his mind and his pen that he may worthily declare the glory of Thy Divinity, and give pious utterance to the true faith concerning Thee. The cause indeed is Thine, for by a certain Divine impulse it is that I am led to speak of Thy Glory from the Father. In former days did I begin to treat of this, and again do I enter upon it; for now am I to be made known to all the pious; now truly are the days complete, as appears from the certainty of the thing itself and the visible signs of the times. The Light Thou hast said is not to be hidden; so woe to me do I not evangelise!

‘It rests with thee, then, O Reader, that thou show thyself well disposed towards Christ, even to the End, and that thou hear our subject discussed at length in words of truth without disguise.’

After a somewhat careful perusal of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ we know not how it could be better or more briefly characterised, in its theoretical portion at least, than as a paraphrase and new interpretation of the Gospel according to John, in which the Neo-platonic doctrine of the Logos is particularly discussed, and copiously interfused with pantheistic ideas, whilst the dogmatic teaching of the Church of Rome and its practical application is repudiated in toto, and the chief doctrines of Lutheran and Calvinistic Christianity are controverted.

Assuming the leading positions of the writer as guides, we should say that in his philosophy he regards the world as a manifestation and communication of God in time and space, manifestation taking place, as he says, through the Word, communication through the agency called Spirit. The first of things in which God showed Himself, he says, was Light, which he speaks of as uncreated—lux increata, essence or first principle of things—all existence, all generation being effected by the energising power of light. In, and of, and first manifested by light, God, however, is not identified therewith, any more than with the things of creation, in all of which he is still held to be immanent. God indeed in himself is supersensuous and incomprehensible, for he transcends all things—mind as well as matter. When not sought to be defined by negatives, God is to be thought of as Absolute Being, and all existence, as deriving from him, is to be accounted divine, although in diverse degrees.

The manifold manifestations which God makes of himself in nature are referred to a single dispensation or mode, the mode of the Plenitude of Substance, which comprises all other modes or dispensations in their endless diversity, patterns or types of all things that be having been present in the mind of God before they were in themselves. An architypal universe is therefore assumed as having existed before the actual world came into being, and this, says Servetus, is the Logos of Scripture and Philosophy—the Divine Reason, wherein reflected all things showed themselves visibly. Ea ipsa erat ????? erat ratio mirifica in qua omnia visibiliter relucebat. The Logos—Divine Word, Divine Wisdom, God himself, in fact—it is that is revealed or manifested in Creation, as in the fulness of time it also became incarnate in Christ; for, even as before Creation the world existed ideally in God, so before the incarnation was Christ potentially present in the Divine mind as the Divine word, in the same way as the future plant is extant in the seed. From the beginning, therefore, it was a virtual or potential Son, not any actual co-eternal Son, who existed beside the Father, the Son first acquiring form and substance in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and being made participant of the Holy Spirit at the moment of his birth when he began to breathe; for Servetus assimilated the abstraction entitled Spirit to breath or wind: God, say the Scriptures, breathed into the nostrils of man and he became a living soul.

Possessed, as he was, by the principles of the Neo-platonic and other more ancient philosophies, Servetus assimilates Christ to the Demiurgos, and makes of him the architect and fashioner of the world—ille mundi Architectus Christus—Creator even of the elements from which, intermingled, are educed the substantial forms of things. How this was brought about if Christ only became a reality at his birth, he does not say. But it is not a little interesting to note how nearly our own Great King of transcendental song approaches some of these fancies of our author, for Milton too speaks of Light as

A little further on he also has the Son as Agent in Creation:—

Creation ended, he continues:—

Into what labyrinths are men led when they give the rein to imagination, and the demon of speculation divorced from science is suffered to have his uncontrolled way!

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Coming to a more particular analysis of the ‘Restitutio,’ we find the first book treating of the man Jesus, in which he is shown to be, 1st, Man; 2nd, Son of God; and 3rd, God.

I. The name Jesus [Joshua, Hebraice], says Servetus, is the name of a man and was given on the day of the Circumcision; the cognomen Christ [???st??, GrÆce, the anointed], was bestowed by the Disciples, but never admitted by the Jews, who only knew Jesus as the son of Joseph. There was indeed frequent discussion among the disciples themselves, whether Jesus was the Messiah or not; and we know that kings, in virtue of the anointing at their coronation, were entitled Christs—Cyrus, for instance, is called Masach by the Prophet, the word Christ being no more than the Hebrew title translated into Greek.

II. It is as a Son of God,—???? Te??—that Jesus is spoken of in the Scriptures. But if so, then is he to be thought of as engendered by God as thou by thy father. God, it is true, is in a certain sense the Father of all men as he is of Jesus; but we are his sons by adoption as Jesus is his Son by nature. Jesus, indeed, was believed to be the son of Joseph, but he was truly the Son of God, having, without any sophistry, been engendered of his substance: the Word of God overshadowed the Virgin like a cloud, and acted in her as generative dew, comparable to the shower from heaven that causes the earth to bring forth flowers and fruit. It follows, therefore, that the son of the Virgin is also truly, naturally, the Son of God.

III. Christ is God, and is so called because in him is God substantially, corporeally present; for he is God by his geniture as by his flesh he is man (p. 15), God and man being truly conjoined in one substance and made one body, one new man. As the Father is true God, so, in bestowing his divineness (Deitas) on his only Son, did he cause it to be that the Son should be true God.

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Having spoken of God and Christ, he treats next of the Trinity. In the beginning, it is said, was the word, ? ?????, an expression whereby inward Reason and outward Speech are implied. Some, says the writer, have held that God can be defined no otherwise than by negations: ears have not heard God speak, save by the voice of man; hands have not touched Him, for He is incorporeal; place holds Him not, for He cannot be circumscribed; and time gives no measure of Him, for, infinite, He is without beginning and without end. But all this only speaks of what God is not; it does not teach what God is. Now, no one knows God who is ignorant of the mode in which He has willed to manifest Himself to us, plainly exposed though it be in the sacred oracles. These, however, the Sophists do not believe, because they will not see God in Christ (p. 111). In the Word made flesh, in the face of Jesus Christ it is that we see the Light—God Himself—shining upon us. In thinking of the engenderment of Christ, and his appearance on earth, the veil of any intervening time is to be rejected; Christ being to be conceived of as having been eternally engendered in the mind of God, but only begotten of his substance in time in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The man Christ is therefore, and because of this, fitly spoken of as the first-born Son of God, begotten before all worlds (pp. 56, 57), substantially visible before creation, and possessed of eternal substance—visibilem cum (Christum) substantialiter ante omnia fuisse et substantiam Æternam habere (p. 57)—the meaning of which we imagine to be this: that the idea of Christ, present in the mind of God from eternity, took form by his immediate agency in the womb of Mary, the wife of Joseph, whose son the man Jesus was believed by his contemporaries to be, though he was indeed the Son of God.

One of the items of transcendental belief, therefore, in which Servetus differed wholly from the Reformers, had reference to the coeternity of the Father and the Son. On this head he says particularly, ‘If there were in eternity two incorporeal beings alike and equal, then were these Twins rather than a Father and Son; and were a third Entity added, like and equal to the other two, then were there a threefold Geryon produced.’ These words, and others of corresponding import, were found highly objectionable or blasphemous by the Reformers, as we have already had occasion to say.

In connection with this part of his subject the writer adds several of the comments he had appended to the Pagnini Bible, particularly the one in which he discusses the verse of Isaiah, beginning: ‘A virgin shall conceive and bear a son,’ &c., in which he maintains that the Almah, the marriageable woman mentioned, refers immediately to Abija, the youthful wife of Ahaz, then pregnant with Hezekiah.

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Thus far advanced, it is now that we find the pantheistic conceptions of our author most fully enunciated. Referring to the words quoted by St. Paul, ‘In God we live, and move, and have our being,’ Servetus maintains that God is in all things, and all things are in God; in his own words, ‘It is God who gives its ESSE or essential being to every existing thing—to inanimate creation, to living creatures in general, and to man in especial.’

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The fifth book treats of the Holy Spirit. ‘As the essence of God is the Word,’ says our author, ‘in so far as manifestation is made in the world, so, and in so far as communication is made, it is Spirit; manifestation and communication, however, being ever co-ordinate and conjoined. It is spirit that is the architype, eternally present in God, from whom it proceeds’ (p. 163). And it is in this place that our author explains or illustrates some of his metaphysical positions by a reference to Anatomy, with which in various interesting particulars he shows himself more satisfactorily intelligible than in his transcendental speculations.

‘There is commonly said to be a threefold spirit in the body of man, derived from the substance of the three superior elements—a natural, a vital, and an animal spirit; there are, however, not really three, but only two distinct spirits. One of these, the first, characterised as natural, is communicated from the arteries to the veins by their anastomoses, and is primarily associated with the blood, the proper seat or home of which is the liver and veins. The second is the vital spirit, whose seat or dwelling-place is the heart and arteries. The third, the animal spirit, comparable to a ray of light, has its home in the brain and nerves. In each and all of these is the force—energeia—of the one spirit and light of God comprised. Now, that the natural spirit is imparted from the heart to the liver, and not from the liver to the heart, is proclaimed by the formation of man in the womb; for we see an artery associate with a vein sent from the mother through the navel of the foetus; and in the adult body we always find an artery and a vein conjoined. But it was truly into the heart of Adam that God breathed the breath of life or the soul. From the heart, therefore, it is that life is communicated to the liver; for by the breathing into the mouth and nostrils it was that the soul was first truly imparted, the breath tending directly to the heart.

‘The heart is the first organ that lives, and, situate in the middle of the body, is the source of its heat. From the liver the heart receives the liquor, the material as it were of life, and in turn gives life to the source of the supply. The material of life is therefore derived from the liver; but, elaborated as you shall hear, by a most admirable process, it comes to pass that the life itself is in the blood—yea that the blood is the life, as God himself declares (Genes. ix.; Levit. xvii.; Deut. xii.).

‘Rightly to understand the question here, the first thing to be considered is the substantial generation of the vital spirit—a compound of the inspired air with the most subtle portion of the blood. The vital spirit has, therefore, its source in the left ventricle of the heart, the lungs aiding most essentially in its production. It is a fine attenuated spirit, elaborated by the power of heat, of a crimson colour and fiery potency—the lucid vapour as it were of the blood, substantially composed of water, air, and fire; for it is engendered, as said, by the mingling of the inspired air with the more subtle portion of the blood which the right ventricle of the heart communicates to the left. This communication, however, does not take place through the septum, partition or midwall of the heart, as commonly believed, but by another admirable contrivance, the blood being transmitted from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein, by a lengthened passage through the lungs, in the course of which it is elaborated and becomes of a crimson colour. Mingled with the inspired air in this passage, and freed from fuliginous vapours by the act of expiration, the mixture being now complete in every respect, and the blood become fit dwelling-place of the vital spirit, it is finally attracted by the diastole, and reaches the left ventricle of the heart.

‘Now that the communication and elaboration take place in the lungs in the manner described, we are assured by the conjunctions and communications of the pulmonary artery with the pulmonary vein. The great size of the pulmonary artery seems of itself to declare how the matter stands; for this vessel would neither have been of such a size as it is, nor would such a force of the purest blood have been sent through it to the lungs for their nutrition only; neither would the heart have supplied the lungs in such fashion, seeing as we do that the lungs in the foetus are nourished from another source—those membranes or valves of the heart not coming into play until the hour of birth, as Galen teaches. The blood must consequently be poured in such large measure at the moment of birth from the heart to the lungs for another purpose than the nourishment of these organs. Moreover, it is not simply air, but air mingled with blood that is returned from the lungs to the heart by the pulmonary vein.

‘It is in the lungs, consequently, that the mixture [of the inspired air with the blood] takes place, and it is in the lungs also, not in the heart, that the crimson colour of the blood is acquired. There is not indeed capacity or room enough in the left ventricle of the heart for so great and important an elaboration, neither does it seem competent to produce the crimson colour. To conclude, the septum or middle partition of the heart, seeing that it is without vessels and special properties, is not fitted to permit and accomplish the communication and elaboration in question, although it may be that some transudation takes place through it. It is by a mechanism similar to that by which the transfusion from the vena portÆ to the vena cava takes place in the liver, in respect of the blood, that the transfusion from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein takes place in the lungs, in respect of the spirit.

‘The vital spirit (elaborated in the manner described) is at length transfused from the left ventricle of the heart to the arteries of the body at large, and in such a way that the more attenuated portion tends upwards, and undergoes further elaboration in the retiform plexus of vessels situated at the base of the brain, in which the vital begins to be changed into the animal spirit, reaching as it now does the proper seat of the rational soul. Here, still further sublimated and elaborated by the igneous power of the soul, the blood is distributed to those extremely minute vessels or capillary arteries composing the choroid plexus, which contain or are the seat of the soul itself. The arterial plexus penetrates even the most intimate part of the brain, its constituent vessels, interwoven in highly complex fashion, being distributed over the ventricles, and sent to the origins of the nerves which subserve the faculties of sensation and motion. Most wonderfully and delicately interwoven, these vessels, although spoken of as arteries, are really the terminations of arteries proceeding to the origins of nerves in the meninges. They are in truth a new kind of vessels; for, as in the transfusion from arteries to veins within the lungs we find a new kind of vessels proceeding from the arteries and veins, so, in the transfusion from arteries to nerves, is there a new kind of vessels produced from the arterial coats and the cerebral meninges.’ ‘Chr. Rest.’ p. 170.

There can be no question as to the fact that, in the above quotation, the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart through the lungs by the pulmonary artery and vein, is proclaimed, and a farther transmission of its more subtle part at least from the left ventricle of the heart to the arteries of the body is indicated. After so much said, however, the account halts. There is no notice of any transfusion from the arteries to the veins of the body, and so of a return of the blood by their means to the right side of the heart—nor do we believe that anything of the kind was present to the mind of the writer. The truth is that Servetus was not thinking of a circulation of the blood in the sense in which we understand the term, but of a means of engendering the vital and animal spirits. ‘The blood,’ he says happily and well, ‘is not sent to the lungs in such large quantity for their nourishment only. As in the foetus, so in the adult are they nourished from another quarter.’ To Servetus as to his age the liver was the fountain of the blood, and the venous system connected with it the channel by which materials for the growth and nourishment of the body were supplied. The heart again was the source of the heat of the body, and, with the concurrence of the lungs, the elaboratory of the vital spirits; the arterial system in connexion with it being the channel by which the spirit that gives life and special endowment to the bodily organs is distributed.

Though Servetus saw that the black blood which is attracted, as he says, by the diastole of the heart from the vena cava acquires the florid colour in its passage through the lungs, he never hints at the black blood of the systemic veins having been the florid blood of the arteries. We are not, however, to overlook his remark, though it is only by the way, of ‘the natural spirits being communicated from the arteries to the veins by their anastomoses.’ Servetus may consequently have had an intimation of the systemic circulation; but he did not think out his thought. He does not speak of an intermediate system of vessels between the arteries and veins of the body as of certain other corresponding vessels of the lungs; and when we find him making the arteries of the brain terminate in the nerves or meninges—the source of the nerves to the old physiologists, we can only conclude that he believed the arteries of the body to end in like manner in the several tissues to which they are distributed. From what he says further concerning the life of the foetus in utero, we learn positively that Servetus had not divined the systemic circulation. ‘The embryo lives through the soul of the mother,’ says he, ‘it is as it were a part of the mother, the vital spirit being communicated to it by the umbilical arteries.’ Instead of afferent canals of the blood from the heart of the foetus to the placenta of the mother, consequently, Servetus believed the umbilical arteries to be efferent channels of the vital spirit of the mother to the heart of the foetus. He at the same time, doubtless, saw the umbilical veins as the channels by which material for its growth and nutrition was brought from the mother to be distributed by the venous system proceeding from the liver and vena cava, in conformity with the physiological views of his age. Servetus did not think of the foetal heart save as the passive recipient of life. He never heard its rapid tick tack, nor dreamt of it any more than he did of the heart of the adult as the agent in the general distribution of the blood in a great circle from arteries to veins, from veins to arteries, unbroken in the embryo, but complicated when independent life is assumed by the necessary passage through the lungs.

Imperfectly, incompletely, therefore, as the great function of the circulation is conceived by Servetus, his account of so much of it as belongs to the pulmonary system is all his own and an immense advance on aught that had been imagined before. Had his ‘Restoration of Christianity’ been suffered to get abroad in the world and into the hands of anatomists, we can hardly imagine that the immortality which now attaches so truly and deservedly to the great name of Harvey would have been reserved for him. But save to a few theologians, who gave no heed to his physiological speculations, Servetus’s book remained unknown in the republic of letters, for more than a century after it had fallen from the press—no naturalist had seen it during all that time. So effectually had it been hunted out and made away with, that of the thousand copies printed, two only, as we have seen, are now known to survive. The ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ of Michael Servetus, consequently, never influenced either speculation or discovery in connection with the circulation of the blood. But reading the book as we are now suffered to do, let us not overlook in its author the Physiological Genius of his age. Who shall say what amount of influence the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ might have had upon both Science and Religion had it been suffered to see the light! For it is not the possession only, but the pursuit of truth that truly ennobles man; and in Servetus’s incomplete induction in the sphere of physics we see the path fairly entered on that has given to modern science all its triumphs. Nor pause we here: in the domain of letters and criticism, he is nowise less in advance of his age than in physiology. Who among biblical scholars before Servetus had seen the applicability of so much that is said in the Psalms and prophetical books of the Jewish Scriptures to men and events contemporaneous with, when they had not preceded, the times in which their authors lived? Servetus’s contemporaries among the Reformers without exception set out from the letter of the New Testament as the source of their faith, the warrant for the conclusions they built upon its text. But he declared that there was a Christian Doctrine before there was any New Testament; and we now know that this came not into existence until thirty, forty, sixty, and in parts as many as 150, years had passed after the great moral teacher of Nazareth had expiated his superiority to the shows and superstitions and errors of his day by the cruel death of the cross.

Had biblical criticism become a science a century sooner than it did, the world might now by possibility be nearer the goal of truth as regards the Religious Idea than it is, and grave doubts have sooner arisen as to the competency of the barbarous Jews to solve the mystery of the ‘Something not ourselves’ which we are led by our nature to conceive and think of as Cause, and to imagine as over and above this ‘bank and shoal of Time,’ whereon we pass our lives.

Quitting physiological discussion for his proper subject, our author approaches the practical part of his theory of Christianity. Faith is the first element, and is spoken of as an emotion rather than a cognition—a spontaneous movement of the heart, not an act of the understanding, its essence being belief in the man Jesus Christ as the Son of God (pp. 297-300). The end and object of the whole New Testament teaching, he says, is to lead men to a belief of this kind (p. 293), whereby they are reconciled and made acceptable to God, conceive a detestation for sin and become exemplars and exponents of the Christian virtues—Love, Hope, and Charity. ‘Faith of this kind,’ he continues, ‘makes us aware of our poverty, of our misery. For if we believe that the man Jesus is the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, we already admit that the world lies in sin and so needs saving.’

Unlike the other Reformers of the Church, Servetus, in this his latest work as in his first, makes much less of the Fall of Man and the wrath of God as consequences of Adam’s transgression. Original sin can hardly be said to have a place in his system. Sin, he even says, was not brought forth on earth, but arose in heaven, through a revolt of the angels under Satan, who, utterly opposed to God in all things, seduced man from his allegiance and so obtained the empire which it was the purpose of Christ’s coming to regain. Instead of holding the heart of man as utterly evil and corrupt, he says, ‘that good works are proper and spontaneous to the individual. By the death of a sinless being on whom, as sinless, Satan had no hold, he was thrown out of the law, forfeited the rights he had acquired, through the disobedience of man, and God recovered the empire he had lost.’ Satan, therefore, performs a highly important part in the Christology of Servetus; but it differs notably from that both of the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches, in this: that Christ does not suffer death to satisfy divine justice and reconcile God to mankind, but to traverse the Devil in the rights he had acquired by guile. But all such speculations belong to a former age of the world. They are the fossils of the speculative stratum in the nature of man, and only of interest now to reasonable people as records of the chimÆras and incongruities that are engendered by imagination dissevered from science, when the understanding, instead of leading, is led, and the unknowable is assumed as foundation adequate to support conclusions affecting the lives of men in this world and their fate in Eternity.

Servetus then makes little or nothing of the ‘Corruption of human nature’ as consequence of Adam’s transgression, so much insisted on by the Reformed Clergy, and he entirely rejects their assumption of man’s incompetence of himself to do anything good. Satan, however, is still seen as the opponent of God in the Restored as in the Reformed system. ‘The Devil intruded himself into all flesh,’ says our ‘Restorer.’ ‘Satan is Sin dwelling within us, and to us is disease and death (p. 385); these being the consequences of Adam’s transgression (p. 358).’ So much our author felt himself bound to accept in a literal sense, for so he finds it written; but he proceeds forthwith to interpret the text in his own way, and declares that Adam’s transgression brought no real guiltiness on mankind; for such can never be incurred through another’s, but only through each man’s own deed, a previous knowledge of what is good and evil being the indispensable condition to responsibility. But as a knowledge of good and evil is only attained when men arrive at years of discretion, so did Servetus think that mortal sin was not committed, nor even guilt incurred, before the twentieth year (pp. 363 and 387). Though made subject to corporal death and scheol by Adam’s fault, men do not for this die spiritually; they will be restored at the last day when Christ comes to judge the world: ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinth. xv.), say the Scriptures [of the apostle Paul]; and these words, according to our author, mean that men will not be condemned to the second or spiritual death because of Adam’s disobedience, but only when, knowing good and evil, they have done much amiss of themselves. Servetus, therefore, speaks of that as a punishment for sin to which teeming nations of the East look forward as reward for the ills of life—Nirwana, a state of unconscious, everlasting rest! Servetus himself has no special place,—no hell either of temporary or eternal torture for wrong-doing.

We do not remember to have met with the word atonement in Servetus’s writings. He had evidently passed beyond the idea of the vengeful Hebrew God and the shedding of blood as a propitiatory means believed in by the Christians of his day, and still so commonly accepted in our own; Servetus’s religion was as comprehensive as that of his great Master. ‘Turks,’ says he, ‘pray aright when they address themselves to God, though they neither know nor believe that God ever promised anything to the patriarchs.’

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Justification is the dogma that is next entered on, and is said to be by grace: ‘We are justified,’ says Servetus, following Paul, ‘when we believe in Christ as the Son of God,’—in the way he apprehended the sonship, being of course to be understood. But, escaping from leading strings, we find him elsewhere declaring, and still in advance of his day, that all who of their own natural motion lead good lives, be they Jews or Pagans, are justified before God, and that the good life suffices to have men resuscitated in glory. ‘God,’ says he, ‘does not repute us just of his own good grace only, but also by the merits of our works; in other words, of our lives.’

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In the book on the perdition of the world and its restoration by Christ, which follows, our author has much on the subject of baptism—the means or preliminary, in his eyes, to Regeneration. He will not, however, allow that unbaptized infants can possibly be looked on as lost souls. ‘The little children whom Christ blessed,’ says he, ‘were not baptized. How should the most clement and merciful Lord condemn those who had never sinned? Did he ever say to the little ones unbaptized: Go ye accursed into everlasting fire? How should he curse those he blessed? They seem to me to attempt to befool me who say that the salvation of an unconscious infant depends on my will to baptize or to leave it unbaptized.’ Opposed to the baptism of infants as a meaningless and inefficient ceremony, Servetus was all the more emphatic in his insistence on the indispensableness of the rite performed later in life. ‘Jesus was circumcised indeed as an infant,’ says he, ‘but only baptized when he was thirty years of age. We ought not, therefore, to approach the Laver of Regeneration before this age if we would imitate Christ.’ ‘PÆdobaptism,’ says he, ‘is a detestable abomination, an extinction of the Holy Spirit in the soul of man, a dissolution of the Church of Christ, a confusion of the whole Christian faith, an innovation whereby Christ is set aside and his kingdom trodden under foot. Woe to you, ye baptizers of infancy, for ye close the kingdom of heaven against mankind—the kingdom of heaven into which ye neither enter yourselves, nor suffer others to enter—woe! woe!’ He who is baptized in his infancy, consequently, who believes that he is properly baptized and so neglects the regenerative rite in years of discretion, according to Servetus, loses his chance of instant entrance into Christ’s kingdom on his death. In his comprehensive charity, however, we fancy Servetus must have a salvo for such neglect, though we have missed it. If he has failed to set it forth in words, we feel assured that it was nevertheless alive in his heart.

In the book on the Power of Satan and Antichrist, Servetus attacks the Papacy in terms of measureless reprobation, likening the Pope to the Antichrist of the Apocalypse, calling him the son of perdition, and speaking of his dominion as the reign of God’s opposite on earth (p. 393). In exalting himself above his fellow-men and requiring them to look on him as a god, the Pope has usurped the forbidden kingdom. The imposition of a spiritual papacy, he maintains, has brought more mischief on the spiritual world than the carnal Adam brought on the world of flesh. For his sin was Adam condemned to the pain of corporeal death, and for theirs are the beast and his ministers (the pope and his council) doomed in the Apocalypse to the pains of everlasting fire (p. 394).

Against monastic vows of all kinds, Servetus is here most vehemently outspoken. According to him, they are mere sacrileges of tradition. He does not object to the celibate life, however, which he says he has chosen for himself; but Peter, he thinks, would be amazed did he see the shaven, cowled, and bedizened priests engaged in their mimic play, whereby they lead the people to the most open idolatry. But it is the mendicant monk that he has in more especial abhorrence. Him he compares to the locust, which, eating up everything it encounters, leaves desolation behind. ‘The locust,’ he says, ‘has by nature a sort of monk’s cowl; add to this a wallet, and you have a begging friar complete; in other words, a hooded devil.’

In the book on the Lord’s Supper, our author speaks of course of the papistical transubstantiation, the annihilation of the bread as bread and its transmutation into mere whiteness. ‘I rather wonder,’ says he, ‘whether Satan was the circumcisor of common sense from the brains of those who of bread make not-bread, and in its stead produce a vendible whiteness; for these puny sacrificators, for a mouthful of whiteness given without wine, make us count out our money (p. 510). To such degradation of mind are these men brought that they call that the true body of Christ, which, in the whiteness they imagine, rats and dogs might devour. Never was there any such blindness as this among the Jews—blindness the more notable as the Papists say they are infallible (p. 511). But as circumcision of the foreskin makes the Jew, and circumcision of the heart the Christian, so does circumcision of the scalp make the sham Jew, the papal sacrificial priest and slave of Antichrist.’

He is scarcely more complimentary when he speaks of the views of the Reformers on the subject of the Supper, styling the Lutherans Impanators, and the Calvinists Tropists, the Roman Catholics being of course Transubstantiators. If we understand him aright, he looks on the Supper as something more than a simple commemorative feast, to be first partaken of immediately after adult baptism, to which it is the necessary complement; but we are startled after what, as we interpret it, he has just said in this sense, when we by and by find him speaking as if he believed that the body and blood of Christ were really partaken of in the Christian Communion (p. 281 and Letter xxx. to Calvin). The contradictory statements met with in the writings of Servetus, however, as we have had occasion oftener than once already to say, can only be harmonised by taking note of his pantheistic views. In the instance before us, for example, on the pantheistic principle, as God is in and of the substance of all things, so was He in Christ, or Christ, in so far, was God. In consonance with the letter, therefore the bread and wine of the solemn rite are flesh and blood. The language of mysticism, however, is often little intelligible to the naturalist, who in his incapacity here may be likened to those who, with ears otherwise acute, cannot distinguish certain extremely acute or grave sounds, or who, with eyes otherwise excellent, see no difference between such opposite colours as red and green. Like the Reformers of all denominations, Servetus maintained the Cup to be an indispensable element in the celebration of the Supper. In the Papal Mass, he says, there is no true Communion. The bread is not broken in common, and the wine is appropriated by the Sacrificator, even as the Babylonian Priests of old appropriated the oblations of the altar: ‘Quorban,’ says the Popish Priest as he drinks, to the lookers on, ‘it will do you good, too.’ (p. 522).

Singularly enough, when we think of what he has to say in disparagement of the Roman Catholic priesthood, we find him recognising in ministers a power to absolve men from their sins and reconcile them to God—potestas ministris est remittendi peccata et reconciliandi homines Deo (p. 516). This, we can only conclude, is said because of what he found in the Sacred Text;61 no word of which, as we know, would he gainsay. But that Michael Servetus, mystic though he was, believed in his soul that one man can absolve another of his sin, we do not think possible. He did not surmise that the fourth gospel was only written a hundred and fifty years after the death of Jesus, and by a Neo-platonic philosopher, presumably of Alexandria, fashioner, like Paul of Tarsus, of a Christology and Christianity of his own.

In illustration of the character of the man, the study of whose life engages us, the prayer with which he concludes the book on the ‘Restoration of Christianity’—for here the work does end in fact, all that follows being but by way of appendix—ought not to be overlooked. It is in immediate sequence to a renewed phillipic against the baptizers of infants, and to the following effect:—

‘Almighty Father! Father of all mercy, free us miserable men from this darkness of death, for the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ Our Lord. O Jesus Christ, thou Son of God, who died for us, help us, lest we perish! We, thy suppliants, pray to thee as thou hast taught us, saying, Hallowed be thy Name; thy kingdom come; and do thou, Lord, come! thy bride the Church, praying in the Apocalypse, says, Come! The spirits of thy children, praying here, say, Come! Let all who hear this pray and cry aloud, and with John exclaim, Come! Thou Who hast said, I come quickly (Apocalypse xxii.) wilt surely come, and with thy coming put an end to Antichrist. So be it. Amen!’

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The first of the additions to the system of ‘Restored Christianity’ are the thirty letters to Calvin, which we have already analysed, in what seemed the appropriate place.

The book or chapter on the ‘Sixty signs of the reign of Antichrist, and of his presence among us,’ which follows, need not detain us. The signs are for the most part arbitrarily assumed by the writer, on the ground that his own views are the truth, those of the Papists and Reformers mistaken, false, or short of the truth. Having shown to his own satisfaction that every evil-doer, in the shape of an exalted personage who has ever appeared in the world, even from Satan, Nimrod, and Nebuchadnezzar, prefigured the Pope, and that the Pope is Antichrist, he then very logically concludes that all the dogmas and doctrines sanctioned by the Papacy are of the Devil. Under this category he places the doctrine of the Trinity in the foremost rank, then the Baptism of Infants, the Mass, Transubstantiation, all but everything, in short, characteristic of Roman Catholic Christianity. As in so many other places, he is here also ready with a prayer, which we quote as ever-recurring testimony to the sincerely, but misunderstood, pious nature of the man:—

‘O Christ Jesus, Son of God, most merciful Liberator, who hast so often freed thy people from their straits, free us too from this Babylonian Captivity of Antichrist, from his hypocrisy, his tyranny, his idolatry! Amen.’

The concluding part of the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ is an address to Melanchthon and his colleagues on the Mystery of the Trinity and the discipline of the ancient Church. We have seen that Melanchthon of all the Reformers was the one who seemed to be most taken by the theological speculations of the seven books on Trinitarian error. ‘I read Servetus a great deal,’ says he to his friend Camerarius; and if he found the work objectionable in many respects, as he says, it yet contained matter that would not be put aside, but that forced itself on his attention, and may be presumed to have influenced his final conclusions on some of the highest and most difficult doctrines of orthodox Christianity. Certain it is that the first and earlier editions of his highly popular work, the ‘Loci Theologici,’ differ notably from those that appeared subsequently to the publication of Servetus’s ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis.’ In the first and earlier editions there is nothing said of God, whether as One or Triune, of Creation, the Incarnation, and other purely speculative matters. ‘These subjects,’ he says, ‘are wholly incomprehensible, and we more properly adore than attempt to investigate the mystery of Deity. What, I ask you,’ he continues, ‘has been the outcome of the scholastic and theological discussions that have gone on for all these ages?’ But the metaphysics of Christianity were not passed over in any such way by Servetus. His earliest work even meets us in some sort as a complementary criticism of the ‘Loci’ of Melanchthon, and that it was so held by the Reformer seems to be demonstrated by the many changes and additions to be noticed in the revised edition of the work of the year 1535, the first that was published after the appearance of the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis’ and ‘Dialogi duo de Trinitate.’62

Finding himself very freely handled in the revised editions of the ‘Loci,’ his errors, as they are designated as matter of course, being assimilated to those of Paul of Samosata and others, and his references to Tertullian and the ante-NicÆan Fathers proclaimed irrelevant, Servetus retorts, and, throwing moderation to the winds, proceeds in the diatribe we have before us to pour out the vials of his displeasure on the head of the great Wittemberg scholar and theologian. Our Restorer of Christianity does, it is true, see Melanchthon as somewhat nearer the mark than Luther, Calvin, and Œcolampadius; but the references made to Athanasius, Augustin, and the Fathers who came after the Council of NicÆa, are all put out of court—their conclusions are of non-avail; for they had all bowed the knee to the Beast, and bore his mark. The true Church of Christ had already forsaken the earth in their day, and their teaching on the Trinity, Baptism, the Supper, &c., was nought. Strange to say, as proceeding from a scholar, himself no indifferent master of the Latin tongue, he reproaches Melanchthon with the elegance of his Latinity. The Holy Ghost, says he, never spoke in fine phrases! (P. 674.)

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It is difficult to conceive a man not utterly bereft of reason and common sense, living among Roman Catholics and in times of deadly persecution for heresy, writing in the style of Servetus on the Papacy and the most accredited tenets of Christianity. Yet is it impossible to imagine that he was blind to the danger he incurred in doing so; neither do we believe that he knowingly and advisedly staked his life against the cause he certainly had so much at heart. He may have said, indeed, that he believed he should die for his opinions; but we see him taking what he must have meant as sufficient precautions against such a contingency; and when first brought face to face with the prospect of accomplishing the destiny he foreshadowed, we find him showing anything but the recklessness of the true martyr. We presume that the security in which he had dwelt so long under his assumed name, the immunity from suspicion of heresy he had enjoyed since the publication of his first work, and the latitude allowed him by his clerical friends of Vienne in discussing the heresies of the Reformers—and it may be also some of a minor sort of their own—misled him. His seven books on erroneous conceptions of the Trinity appear to have been little, if at all, known to the ecclesiastics of France; and he probably imagined that in appealing to the press again and keeping his work from the booksellers’ shops of the country of his adoption, he would continue to be overlooked. Anything of a heretical nature he should publish now might possibly be challenged by the German and Swiss Reformers; but they were heretics in the eyes of the Viennese, and, provided he did not openly proclaim himself the author, their ill report, if perchance it ever reached France, would do the author of the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ no harm, if it did not even tend to exalt him among orthodox adherents of the Church of Rome.

Every reasonable precaution therefore taken that the new book on the Restoration of Christianity should not get abroad in France, Servetus seems to have thought himself safe against detection and pursuit. He was in fact altogether unknown, as we have said, in the place of his residence as Michael Serveto, alias RevÉs, of Aragon, in Spain. He was M. Michel Villeneuve, Physician of Vienne, and living under the patronage of its Archbishop. There was, however, so strong a family likeness between the ‘Seven Books and Two Dialogues on Trinitarian Error’ and the ‘Restoration of Christianity,’ or the views therein contained, that the most cursory comparison of the two works would have disclosed their common parentage, even if the writer of the ‘Restoration’ had not himself hinted plainly enough at the fact. He must have thought himself perfectly safe in his incognito at Vienne, and seems not to have dreamt of danger from abroad. There could be no reason, therefore, why Calvin, and through him the other Reformers of Switzerland, should not be made aware of what he had been about. He would in truth take his place beside or above them all as the real Restorer of Christianity, proclaimer, as he believed himself to be, of the true doctrine concerning Christ as the naturally begotten Son of God; of the Salvation to be secured by faith in him as such; of the Regeneration to be effected by baptism performed in years of discretion, and of the absurdity implied in imagining division in the essence of God, and instead of the One great Creator of heaven and earth, having a Three-headed chimÆra for a Deity! In this view, as we conclude, he sent a copy of his book to Calvin; and with consequences which it will now be our business to follow to their disastrous conclusion; for all that remains of the life of Michael Servetus, cut short in the flower of his age, is entirely subordinated to influences brought to bear on it through the printing of this work and the interference of the Reformer of Geneva.63