THE ATTITUDE OF CALVIN—THE HOPES OF SERVETUS.

Informed of the decree of the Court, Calvin tells us that he bestirred himself to have the sentence carried out in the way usual in criminal cases, by beheading with the sword, instead of burning by slow fire. The heretic must be got rid of, he must die, but the Reformer would give a civil rather than an ecclesiastical complexion to the business, and escape imitation of the Roman Catholic cruel mode of putting God’s enemies, as heretics were called, to death. The Council, however, did not enter into his views. The Canon Law, still in force over Europe, condemned the convicted heretic to death by fire, and the majority of the Court determined to abide by the statute as it stood. Bigotry and intolerance, fanned to fever heat, were in the ascendant, and would forego none of their most terrible means of punishing the offender, and striking terror into the vulgar mind. The oblation in such cases provided, would even have appeared to lose its significance, had it been presented otherwise than as ‘a sacrifice of a sweet savour made by fire to the Lord’; for still influenced by the ritual of the old Hebrew Law, which, in earlier days, required the first-born of man and beast for the altar, and had criminals of all sorts ‘hung up before the sun,’ lives forfeited for theological errors, were, in reality, offerings to appease the wrath or win the favour of the Supreme!

Servetus, meanwhile, made aware that the trial was at an end, and that nothing more remained for him but to learn his fate, though he may have been alarmed by the additional measures taken for his safe custody, seems not yet, as we have said, to have abandoned the persuasion that he would either be acquitted or subjected to some minor or merely nominal penalty. He was not conscience-stricken; he knew himself guilty of no impiety or intentional blasphemy; his object from first to last had been to present what he thought were higher, truer views of the Revelation which he believed God had made of himself to mankind in the olden time in JudÆa; and the proclaimed purpose of his latest work, as he said himself to his Judges, was the Restoration, not the destruction of Christianity. More than this: he was not now among Papists bound to intolerance by their creed, but among Protestants in Geneva—the stronghold of free thought and its necessary logical adjunct, toleration; among men who had studied, reasoned, and, like himself, put their own construction on writings which he as well as they believed to be the Word of God. And then, had he not all along been upheld by Perrin and Berthelier, in the belief of triumphing over his persecutor? How should hopes of longer life in view of further effort in the cause that was dear to him, and of freedom to shape out thoughts on matters high and holy, have forsaken him? True, Calvin had aimed at his life through the people of Vienne; and in his present bonds, and all the unworthy usage he suffered, he could not fail to realise the persistent hostility of the man who held him in such despite. Still he was in Geneva, though a prisoner, and Calvin was not all in all within that Republican city. There was a powerful party opposed to the tyranny and self-assertion of the ecclesiastic, the distinguished heads of which gave him their countenance and support—there seemed hardly room for doubt: he would not be found guilty of having blasphemed, but would be acquitted and set at liberty.

Cherishing such hopes and so supported, are we to wonder that the Sentence of Death took the unhappy Servetus entirely by surprise? Only imparted to him in the early morning of the day on which he was doomed to die, he was at first as if struck dumb by the intelligence. He did but groan aloud and sigh as if his heart would burst; and when he recovered speech at length, it was only to rave like one demented, to strike his breast, and cry in his native Spanish, Misericordia, Misericordia! By degrees, however, he recovered his self-possession and became more calm. Master of himself, and reverting in thought to his pursuer, his first coherent words were to request an interview with Calvin, which he, we need not doubt, was nowise slow to grant, for he must have thought it both a flattering and a hopeful proposal. Now had the sinner come to his senses; now would he make a clean breast of it, abjure the convictions of his life, and with a lie on his lips be made meet for glory! But nothing of all this was in the mind of Servetus. He had no misgivings about his theological conclusions; in these he was securely anchored; but he felt like a true man in the face of impending fate, and would own that he had not comported himself with all the respect that was rightfully due to his theological opponent. Hence his request for the interview.

Accompanied by two of the Councillors, Calvin entered the prison an hour or two before noon of the fateful October 27, 1553, and prefacing the account he has left us of what transpired at the meeting, by saying that Servetus had received the notice of his sentence and impending doom with a ‘sort of brutish stupidity—cum belluina stupiditate,’ he proceeds: ‘I asked him what he wanted with me—quidnam vellet? To which he replied, that he desired to ask my pardon.’ I then said that I had never prosecuted anyone on merely personal grounds; that I had admonished him with all the gentleness I could command as many as sixteen years ago, and not without danger to my own life had spared no pains to cure him of his errors. But all in vain! my expostulations appeared rather to excite his bile. Quitting speech of myself, however, I then desired him rather to ask pardon of the Eternal God, towards whom he had shown himself but too contumelious, presuming, as he had done, to take from his Essence the three hypostases that pertain to it; and saying that were it possible to show a personal distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we should have a three-headed Cerberus for a God; with much beside that need not now be repeated. Seeing, ere long, that all I said went for nothing, and feeling indisposed to trespass on the time of the Magistrates, or to appear something more than my Master, in obedience to the precept of Paul, I took my leave of the heretic, a?t??at????t??—self-condemned.99

But there is a deep-lying truth in the French adage: ‘Qui s’excuse s’accuse—he who excuses accuses himself.’ The first impulse of the tolerant Servetus, on coming to his senses, was to ask pardon of the man who had brought him to his death; the first impulse of the implacable Calvin was to apologise for his deed, and to shift to a sense of public duty, a course to which his secret soul informed him he had been mainly prompted by private hate. Nor is that which Calvin connects with his apology, when he speaks of having imperilled his life for Servetus’s sake, to be received as true in fact. That he would have braved any danger that might have accompanied the public discussion of their opinions proposed by Servetus in 1534, we can well believe; but he was not required to face it, and all their subsequent correspondence, private and confidential as it was, could have been attended with peril neither to him nor Servetus—or if to either it must have been to Servetus had he been discovered in correspondence with the arch-heretic of Geneva. We can hardly imagine Calvin to have been so totally devoid of humanity as to have felt no compunctious visitings when he stood face to face with the man whom his persistent enmity alone had brought to such a pass; but he would also have been other than he meets us in history, and otherwise circumstanced than he was as a?t????t??—despot of Geneva—had he not felt something of self-gratulation and even of triumph, when pardon was asked of him by his humbled foe.