PARIS. ASSUMPTION OF THE NAME OF VILLENEUVE OR VILLANOVANUS. ACQUAINTANCE WITH CALVIN.
His indifferent reception by the German and Swiss Reformers must have satisfied Servetus that there was no abiding place for him among them. He was doubtless disappointed and not a little disconcerted by the treatment he met with at their hands. He had come as a light-bringer, as a fellow striver for the Truth through independent reading of the Scriptures. Studious and learned; smitten with divine philosophy; emancipated from the fetters of the church of Rome; tolerant and charitable, he doubtless thought that the liberal studies in Humanity and the Greek letters in which he knew the Reformers excelled, must as a matter of course have imparted to them something of the liberality and comprehensiveness he felt in himself. Face to face with their leaders in Basle and Strasburg, however, he was undeceived; and when he saw that his book on Trinitarian Error, instead of bringing him fame and friends, earned him nothing but evil report and enemies, and might even compromise his personalsafety, there was nothing left for him but to pack up and begone.
He must have quitted Switzerland immediately after writing his letter to Œcolampadius, and in all likelihood taken up his quarters at Hagenau, where he lived quietly for some weeks or months engaged in writing and supervising the printing of the ‘Two Dialogues,’ with which and the concluding anathema against all tyrants of the church, as a parting shot, he went on his way to France, reaching Paris towards the end of 1532. He had in fact made the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Elsass where he was known, too hot for him, to use a familiar phrase; and the parts where French was the mother tongue had not yet taken up with Calvin or another great name opposed to the Papacy, that might have led his thoughts towards them. He was besides but indifferently acquainted with the German language; in circumstances, too, we may presume, that made it impossible for him to remain in any place where he had not remunerative occupation of some sort; and this, with the whole world of the Reformation against him, he saw he could not now obtain in quarters where he had once hoped to find a welcome and a footing. He had therefore no choice left but retreat; and Paris was the place where accomplishments of the kind he possessed were most likely to find a market.
With all his hardihood and self-confidence, Servetus was not without so much prudence as assured him thata certain amount of caution and reticence was required of everyone who would live at peace among his fellow men. He doubtless imagined at one time, but had already discovered his mistake, that among heretics, as he had been accustomed to hear the Reformers designated, he might freely expend himself in heresy. To the very end of his life, he seems to have had some difficulty in divining why he had not been welcomed by them with open arms as a brother. But he was well aware that Roman Catholic France had yet less in common with Michael Serveto, alias Revés, author of the Seven books and Two dialogues on Trinitarian Error, than Protestant Switzerland and Germany.
Servetus felt that the writer of these works could not safely show himself in Paris under either his proper family or his maternal name, and so fell readily upon one derived from the town of his nativity, Villanueva. Servetus seems indeed at no time to have been very particular as to his name and designation. On his trial at Vienne he is of Tudela in Navarre, on that at Geneva, of Villanova in Aragon; and Tollin finds him inscribed in the academic register of Paris (1536) and in that of Montpellier, which he must have visited some time in 1540, as neither of Tudela nor Villanova, but of Saragossa! During all the years he lived in France, he was never known save as Monsieur Michel Villeneuve, or, when he wrote in Latin, as Michael Villanovanus. Under the name of Villeneuve he now announced himself, entered as student of mathematicsand physics at one of the colleges, and at a later period took his degrees ofM.A.andM.D.in the University of Paris. Under the same name he subsequently wrote and edited various works at Lyons; and it was as M. Villeneuve that he finally became known in the town of Vienne in Dauphiny, where he lived for twelve years engaged in the practice of medicine, and on terms of intimacy with the Archbishop and all the notabilities of the place, both lay and clerical.
As a man of scholarly acquirements Servetus in the first instance probably found employment, and the means of living with some of the typographers of Paris, as reader and corrector of the press, a line of life which he certainly followed for the next three or four years, in the course of which we find notices of him first at Orleans, then at Avignon, and finally at Lyons, one of the chief centres of the printing and publishing business that had been called into such vigorous life by the revival of learning, the discovery of the art of printing with moveable types, and finally and very essentially by the Reformation.
It was during his first residence of about two years at Paris, 1532-1534, that he made the acquaintance of the man who became in the end his most implacable enemy, and the immediate cause of his untimely and cruel death. This was no other than the celebrated John Calvin, then a young man and about the same age as himself. Partially emancipated from the fetters of the faith in which he had been born and bred,but not less firmly bound in others of his own fashioning, Calvin had already attracted the notice of his friends and the public by his natural abilities and his scholarly acquirements, and been pointed out as likely to influence the progress of the Reformation in his native France. Hearing of Calvin’s presence in Paris, Servetus as Villeneuve must have sought him out, and, still full of the familiar theological subject, have made an attempt upon him as he had already done upon Œcolampadius and the others, for countenance and approval in the discovery he had made of what he believed to be the true saving Christian faith. But with no better success we must conclude; for though the two young men met oftener than once in private, it was without coming to any agreement. They had, therefore, actually resolved on a public discussion, with a view to the voidance of their theological differences.
This, however, never came to pass. Such an exhibition, indeed, could not have taken place at the time without danger to both. Calvin, in his young zeal, and for what he held to be the honour of God, would have faced the danger, but the individual known to his Parisian friends and Calvin as Michel Villeneuve must have seen on afterthought that he could make no public appearance as defender of theoutréopinions he entertained, without betraying the Michael Serveto of the De Trinitatis Erroribus and Dialogues who lay hidden behind the adopted name; and this he knew would be not only to disconcert all his present plans,but assuredly to compromise his life. Calvin, we must presume, had not at this time heard of Servetus’s books; very certainly he had not read them; for one so acute and well-informed on theological matters as he, would not have been more than a few minutes face to face with their author without detecting him. But we find no hint in Calvin’s writings that he then surmised who Villeneuve, his Parisian acquaintance, really was, and conclude that he lived for a dozen years or more without suspecting that the individual he discovered as Michael Serveto of the Book on Trinitarian Error in his correspondent of Vienne, of the year 1546, was the same Villeneuve he had known in Paris in 1534.
Calvin then would have faced the danger of the public discussion, though persecution was hot at the time against heresy, and he was not unsuspected on this score. The danger to him, however, would have been slight in comparison with that which Servetus must have incurred. Calvin would not have stood forth on this occasion as the defender of any heresy, but of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith as embodied in its Creeds; to some of the most essential propositions in which Servetus, on the contrary, must have shown himself diametrically opposed. Servetus therefore, in this instance at least, saw perforce that discretion was the better part of valour, and wisely stayed away. He was in truth far too deeply compromised to venture on an appearance; for if discovered to be Michael Serveto, nothing could have saved him fromthe heretic’s death. He had nothing for it therefore but to forfeit his engagement and lay himself open to Calvin’s reproachful ‘vous avez fuy la luite’—you fled the encounter—of a later and to him more momentous epoch in their common lives.
LYONS. ENGAGEMENT AS READER FOR THE PRESS WITH THE TRECHSELS. EDITS THE GEOGRAPHY OF PTOLEMY.
Theology, however, after which we see Servetus still hankering—hæret lateri letalis arundo!—and even the study of the mathematics on which he was now engaged, had to be abandoned for present means of subsistence; and as Lyons seemed even a better field for the scholar than Paris, to Lyons, after a short stay at Avignon and Orleans, he betook himself. There he appears immediately to have found employment as reader and corrector of the press in the house of the distinguished typographers, the Brothers Trechsel; and if the Age have its character from the aggregate of its science and culture, and the Individual his bent from his more immediate surroundings, we cannot but think of Servetus’s connection with these light-spreaders as another among the highly influential events in his life.
Books in the early days of printing were much more generally written in Latin than in the vernacular, and ever more and more with references to Greek,lately brought greatly into vogue by Erasmus and the Reformers. The reader for press in the best establishments was therefore, and of necessity, a scholar and man of letters; and the opportunities for improvement now put in the way of one like Servetus, even whilst pursuing the mechanical part of his duties, have only to be hinted at to be appreciated. The reading room of the distinguished typographers of those days was, indeed in some sort, a continuation of school and college to the competent corrector of the press.
Servetus’s liberal elementary education, therefore, stood him in good stead at this time; for the Trechsels ere long, instead of holding him to the subordinate though still important duties of reader and corrector, engaged him further as editor of various costly works that issued from their press. Among the number of these a handsome edition of the Geography of Ptolemy36deserves particular mention, both as evincing the good repute in which he stood when we find him entrusted with such a work, and also as showing the extent of his reading and general knowledge—strangely enough, also, as influencing in some remote degree the fate that finally befel him.
Earlier editions of the Ptolemy were faulty in several ways, and disfigured in different degrees byerrors due, in part at least, to indifferent editing. These, where literal, Villanovanus corrected in the new issue; and where the sense was obscure through faulty wording, he brought light by the better readings he supplied, having formed his text, as he says, by collating all the editions he could lay his hands on, and where these gave him no aid, by suggestions of his own.
In his address to the reader, our editor, whom we shall often speak of under his adopted name of Villanovanus, gives a short account of his author, Claudius Ptolemæus, his birth-place, the Roman emperors under whom he flourished, ‘his knowledge of philosophy and the mathematics, and the more than Herculean glory he achieved by his successful but peaceful invasion of so many lands. Nor indeed was this all, for he may be said to have bound earth to heaven by assimilating the measurements of the one to those of the other; and, coming after Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela, he as far surpassed them, as they excelled all the geographers who had gone before them.’
But Villanovanus did much more than edit and amend the text of Ptolemy. ‘We,’ he says, ‘have added scholia to the text, whereby the book is made more interesting and more complete. Using our familiarity with the historical, poetical, and miscellaneous writings of the Greeks and Romans, in so far as they bear on our subject, we have given the names by which the countries, mountains, rivers, and cities were known to them; and, to aid the tyro, have further translated theancient titles of places into those by which they are now designated—into French for France, Italian for Italy, German for Germany, &c., all of which countries we have seen, besides having a knowledge of their languages.’ Extending his vision beyond the mere physical features of the lands he is passing under review, he might have added that he also gives short, but graphic accounts of their inhabitants, the prominent traits of their character, their manners, customs, &c., which are extremely interesting. But Michael Villanovanus is not one of those who hide themselves behind their good works, and so is he now careful to inform his readers of the pains he has taken in their behalf. By them, he says, he hopes his vigils will be properly appreciated, ‘for day and night have I laboured assiduously at my task—dies noctesque jugiter laboravi.’ He concludes his preliminary address in these words: ‘No one, I imagine, will under-estimate the labour, though pleasant in itself, that is implied in the collation of our text with that of other earlier editions, unless it be some Zoilus of the contracted brow, who cannot without envy look on the serious labours of others. But thou, candid reader, whoever thou art, we trust wilt be well disposed, kindly to receive and to approve our work. Farewell!’
Villanovanus’s edition of the Ptolemy is certainly an advance on that of Bilibald Pirckheimer, which formed its groundwork; but it is not so free from literal errors as the laudatory address of the editor might lead us toexpect. And it would have been better had he said that he had enlarged and improved the short and meagre scholia of his editorial predecessor than spoken as if he had supplied them wholly of himself. Villanovanus’s improved comments, however, impress us very favourably with a sense of the pains he must have bestowed on the work, and arouse our respect for the extent and variety of the reading he had undertaken to obtain the information he brings to bear on the physical aspects and natural productions of the several countries described, as well as of the customs, manners, and moral qualities of their inhabitants. Now it was that the smattering of geographic and historic lore he may have picked up as a student at Saragossa and elsewhere stood him in good stead, enabling him, as it did, to advance and profit by the ample stores of information of the kind which the city of Lyons placed within his reach. Living immediately after the age of the great navigators—Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, the Vespucii, and the rest—and in the very days when the works of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, Simon Grynæus, Sebastian Munster, and others enabled the educated to acquire something like a true knowledge of the world they lived in, the new edition of Ptolemy by Michael Villanovanus was a happy thought, and contributed, we need not doubt, no less to his own development than to the spread of useful and humanising information. Engaged on the Ptolemy, the super-subtleties of scholasticism and theology seem to havevanished before the light of the more positive kind of knowledge that now broke around him.
When we turn to the writings of the able individuals mentioned above, we have no difficulty in discovering whence Servetus had most, perhaps all, of his geographical and astronomical knowledge. The Opus Epistolarum of Angleria, in particular, seems to have been the mine from whence he made himself rich in mental wealth of many kinds. We find him imitating, and even improving upon, the lines which head Angleria’sDe Rebus Oceanicisand Grynæus’sTypi Cosmographici, as the reader may see by comparing the verse below37with the one he will find further on, which is prefixed to the 2nd edition of the Ptolemy.
Turning to the Scholia of Villanovanus, we find it not a little interesting in these days to have a glimpse of ourselves in our sires, and of our neighbours in theirs, from the pen of a man of genius hard upon three centuries and a half ago; and as Michael Servetus is really only known to us through his works and the judicial trials he underwent, we make no apology for referring briefly to his additions to the bald and matter-of-fact text of the original Ptolemy.
The map of the first country in the series of fiftyby which the work is illustrated is that of Great Britain. The people ofScotland, Villanovanus informs his reader, are hot-tempered, prone to revenge, and fierce in their anger; but valiant in war and patient beyond belief of cold, hunger, and fatigue. They are handsome in person, and their clothing and language are the same as those of the Irish, their tunics being dyed yellow, their legs bare, and their feet protected by sandals of undressed hide with the hair on. They live mainly on fish and flesh; they have numerous flocks, mostly of sheep, for the country is free from wolves; and they have milk and cheese in abundance. Their arms are bows and arrows and broad swords—lati gladii. Instead of wood, they have coal for fuel. Unlike the people of the last few generations, he says the Scotch are not a particularly religious people. He ‘who never feared the face of man,’ as the Earl of Morton said of Knox, when looking down on his dead body, had not yet made himself felt in the land of his birth; and the School-house had not yet risen as a necessary complement to the Kirk and the Manse, to make the people of Scotland what they have become since his day—among the very foremost of the sons of men.
England, Villanovanus observes, is wonderfully well peopled, and the inhabitants are long-lived. Tall in stature, they are fair in complexion, and have blue eyes. They are brave in war, and admirable bowmen. He has the familiar tale of the English children seen as captives at Rome by the blessed Gregory, who saidthey were called Angli, indeed; but in form and feature showed like Angeli. He must, as it seems, have given some little attention to the English language, if he did not study it more particularly. He says it is so difficult to learn and to pronounce, because the people who speak it are a compound of so many different races.
OfIrelandand the Irish our editor does not speak so favourably. The country, he observes, is generally marshy, so that, unless the summers are dry, the cattle are apt to get lost in the bogs. It is free from noxious creatures of every kind, there being no reptiles, such as snakes, toads, and frogs, and no insects, such as spiders and bees—a state of things which, if it ever obtained, certainly does so no longer. The climate is very temperate, and the soil of great fertility; but the people are rude, inhospitable, barbarous, and cruel, more given to hunting and idle play than to industry. Only three days’ sail from Spain, the Irish, he says, have many customs in common with the Spaniards.
OfSpain, the account given is particularly full, but by no means complimentary, and its people are contrasted—not to their advantage—with their neighbours the French. The extreme dryness of the climate is noticed, which tends to make the country less fertile than France. Irrigation, however, being practised on an extensive scale in many parts, tends to make up for the infrequency of rain, the conduits being often carried to great distances from the rivers. His description ofthe people is far from laudatory. ‘The Spaniard,’ he says, ‘is of a restless disposition, apt enough of understanding, but learning imperfectly or amiss, so that you shall find a learned Spaniard almost anywhere sooner than in Spain. Half-informed, he thinks himself brimful of information, and always pretends to more knowledge than he has in fact. He is much given to vast projects, never realised; and in conversation he delights in subtleties and sophistry. Teachers commonly prefer to speak Spanish rather than Latin in the schools and colleges of the country; but the people in general have little taste for letters, and produce few books themselves, mostly procuring those they want from France.’ The Spanish language, indeed, he speaks of as defective in many respects, and does not fail to remark on the number of Moorish words incorporated with it. The people, he says, ‘have many barbarous notions and usages,’ derived by implication from their old Moorish conquerors and fellow-denizens. ‘The women have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones. They besmirch their faces, too, with minium and ceruse—red and white lead—and walk about on clogs a foot or a foot and a half high, so that they seem to walk above rather than on the earth. The people are extremely temperate, and the women never drink wine. Spaniards, he concludes, are notably the most superstitious people in the world in their religious notions; but theyare brave in the field, of signal endurance under privation and difficulty, and by their voyages of discovery have spread their name over the face of the globe.’
OfFrance, M. Villeneuve has less to say than of Spain; but what he tells us of the royal touch for the cure of scrofula is still interesting in the annals of superstition. ‘I have myself seen the king touching many labouring under this disease, but I did not see that they were cured.’
OfGermany, and he uses the title in a very comprehensive sense—he speaks at considerable length. Smarting under the rebuff he had received at the hands of the Swiss and German Reformers, he is nowise disposed to find the Teutons and their congeners or neighbours however designated, an interesting people, or their territories as in any way attractive. Referring to Tacitus’s account of Germany proper, as overgrown by vast forests, and defaced by frightful swamps, its climate he says is at once as insufferably hot in summer as it is bitterly cold in winter. ‘Hungary,’ he observes, ‘is commonly said to produce oxen, Bavaria swine, Franconia onions, turnips and liquorice, Swabia harlots, Bohemia heretics, Switzerland butchers, Westphalia cheats, and the whole country gluttons and drunkards. The Germans, however, are a religious people; not easily turned from opinions they have once espoused and not readily persuaded to concord in matters of schism, everyone valiantly and obstinately defending the heresy he hashimself adopted;’ words in which we may presume Villanovanus sought to give ease to the pent-up displeasure he felt against his repudiators, the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg.
OfItalyand its people he has little to say; and that not good. The natives readily enough pretend to forgive injuries, but, occasion offering, none revenge themselves so savagely. They make use in their everyday talk of the most horrid oaths and imprecations. Holding all the rest of the world in contempt and calling them barbarians, they themselves have nevertheless been alternately the prey of France, of Spain, and of Germany.
In his survey ofBabylonia, he refers to a certain abominable custom observed by young marriageable women, which is particularly mentioned by Herodotus and also by the writers of the Bible, when read by unsealed eyes, as obtaining among the Jews, and of the money, so objectionably earned in our estimation, being devoted to the service of the Temple.
But the most interesting to us perhaps of all the commentaries attached to the Ptolemy, inasmuch as it influenced the fate of Servetus on his trial at Geneva, is the one appended to the map ofPalestineor the Holy Land. Demurring to much that is said in praise ofJudæain the Bible and by Josephus, as a country specially blessed in various ways, as being well-watered, fertile, &c., the commentator says, that in so far as climate is concerned, it is a temperate land, obnoxiousto the extremes neither of heat nor of cold; a condition of things that may have led the Israelites or Hebrews to imagine that it must be the land that was promised to their forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a land metaphorically said to be flowing with milk and honey. ‘The Israelites,’ it is said in continuation, ‘lived at length under laws received from Moses, although they had gone on piously and prosperously enough through countless ages, before his day, without any written law, having had regard to the oracles of divine or natural truth alone, gifted as they were with aptitude and greatness of mind. Moses, however, that distinguished theologian, thinking that no state could exist without a written code of law and equity, gave them one reduced to ten principal heads, engraved on two tables of stone; with the addition of a great number of minor commandments for the regulation of their lives and dealings with one another. But any more particular notice of these, they being so numerous—great birds not sitting in little nests—must here be passed by. Know, however, most worthy reader, that it is mere boasting and untruth when so much of excellence is ascribed to this land; the experience of merchants and others, travellers who have visited it, proving it to be inhospitable, barren, and altogether without amenity. Wherefore you may say that the land waspromised, indeed, but is oflittle promisewhen spoken of in everyday terms.’
The Ptolemy of Villanovanus was well received,and though costly, a second edition was by and by required. We find it much commended in subsequent reprints by their publishers; and no wonder, for the Ptolemy is really a sumptuous book, upon which a large sum of money must have been spent, the typography being excellent and the text profusely ornamented with woodcuts on the sides of the pages as well as at the heads and tails of the chapters.38
It was whilst engaged in the revision of such works as the Ptolemy and others on the natural sciences, anatomy, medicine, pharmacy, &c., in the service of the Trechsels, that Servetus may be said to have entered on the second, if it were not rather the third, stage of his mental development. The typographer’s reading-room had in truth proved the means of his continued education; each new volume he read and corrected being found a teacher not less influential than the Professor from his chair. The Convent school, Toulouse, and his engagement with Quintana had borne fruit of the kind we discover in the book on Trinitarian error; it was the reading-room of the printers of Lyons that brought him back from the empyrean of metaphysics to the earth, and put him in the way of becoming the geographer, astrologian, biblical critic, physiologist and physician we are made familiar with in his subsequent life and writings.
Among the learned works that flowed in a sort of ceaseless stream from the presses of the Trechsels during Servetus’s tenure of his office as reader withthem, were several from the fertile pen of Doctor Symphorien Champier, or, when he latinised his name, Campeggius, a man of large and liberal culture, of a truly noble nature, an admirer of learning and a patron of the learned; possessed moreover of that restless vanity which made him feel it as much a matter of necessity to live in the eye of the world as to breathe; the effect of which was that he exerted the widest and most beneficent influence among his fellow men. Indefatigable in his proper calling, there was yet nothing which interested the citizens of Lyons that did not interest him. Fearless in bringing help on the battle-field, to which he accompanied his chief the Duke of Lorraine, he was no less ready to brave pestilence in the city, and was as often to be seen in the hovels of the poor as in the palaces of the great and wealthy—inopibus et infortunatis æque indiscriminatimque succurris opitularisve, says his biographer—a true physician, a great and good man.39
Among Champier’s numerous works published about this time, we note thePentapharmacum Gallicum(Lyons, 1534), which Servetus we believe read and corrected for press, the gist of the work being to show that each country produces the medicines best adapted to cure the diseases of its inhabitants, and that to them exotics are for the most part not only useless, butinjurious; an assumption in which he differs notably from present experience and the great writer, his countryman, who came after him, and said that ‘God had inflicted fever on Europe, but put its remedy in America.’ Correcting the proofs of Champier’s five-fold French Pharmacopœia, Servetus must have introduced himself to, or become acquainted with, the author; and if we may credit Pastor Henry Tollin, who will have everyone as truly interested in Servetus as himself, Champier was so much taken by the accomplishments of the poor scholar as even to make a home for him in Lyons. Be this as it may, certain it seems that contact with Champier was that which led Servetus to study medicine, of which he had not thought until now, for it was a science much looked down on by Spaniards in general, its practice being mostly in the hands of Jews and Moors, whom to contemn, where not to oppress, was a religion with all who boasted of their blue blood.
Another of Champier’s books printed by the Trechsels, which we need not doubt Servetus had also read and put to use, was the ‘Hortus Gallicus’ (Lyons 1533). But more influential on him still, though printed in another establishment (that of Seb. Gryphius) during the time he lived in Lyons, was the great Lyonnese Doctor’sCribratio Medicamentorum, with theMedulla Philosophle—the Marrow of Philosophy—appended. In his chapter on the Vital, Animal, and Natural Spirits (p. 137), Champier speaks of ‘spirit as a subtle, aerial, translucid substance produced of thefinest part of the blood, and carried by it from the heart, as principal vital organ, to all parts of the body. Spoken of as three,’ he continues, ‘there are in truth but two kinds of spirit, the vital and the animal.’ The sameness of this to what we shall find in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ will be obvious to all. It strikes us in fact that Villanovanus’s first medical production—the Treatise on Syrups—was wholly inspired by this Marrow of Philosophy of Champier, in which we discover much upon digestion and concoction, the maturation and evacuation of the humours, etc., precisely as in the treatise ‘De Syrupis.’
Nor did Champier’s influence on our scholar end here. One of the Doctor’s treatises is entitled, ‘Prognosticon perpetuum Astrologorum, Medicorum et Prophetarum—The guide of the Astrologer, Physician and Prophet in their prognostications or forecasts.’ Like so many in his age, Champier was a devoted astrologer; and it was he we may conclude who made Servetus one too. Champier having been attacked on the score of his astrology by Leonhard Fuchs, Professor of Medicine in Heidelberg,40Michael Villanovanus, as grateful pupil, took up the pen in defence of his master, and replied by a pamphlet entitled, ‘Defence of Symphorien Champier, addressed to Leonhard Fuchs,41and an Apologetic Dissertation on Astrology.’42Villanovanus,it seems, would not neglect what he must have thought a favourable opportunity of showing himself to the world in company with so distinguished an individual as the great Physician of Lyons, to whom he owns himself much indebted—cui multum debeo, and ventilating a subject that interested him, like so many of his age, only in a less degree than theology itself.
RETURN TO PARIS. STUDIES THERE. JO. WINTER OF ANDERNACH; ANDREA VESALIUS. DEGREES OF M.A. AND M.D. LECTURES ON GEOGRAPHY AND ASTROLOGY.
Villeneuve, we must presume, had reached Lyons poor enough in pocket if rich in lore; but so diligently had he laboured and so liberally had he been paid by the princely publishers of the day, that within two years he found himself in funds sufficient to authorise a return to Paris with a view to the study of Medicine, which he had now resolved to make his profession for life. The rebuff he had had from Œcolampadius, Bucer, and the rest, had probably sickened him for a while with theology and scholasticism, from which, however, we may presume he had only been diverted by his failure to make an immediate impression on the Reformers and the necessity of providing for his daily wants. But ‘the fresh fields and pastures new’ brought into sight by the study of Ptolemy, and the healthy influence of Champier, the physician and naturalist, gave another turn to his mind, and with the money he had earned in his purse, but still comporting himself as the poor scholar, he entered first the College of Calvi,and then that of the Lombards. To these as a subject of the Holy Roman Empire he probably had ready access, and in their quiet shades devoted himself to the new course of study he had determined to pursue.
His larger experience and intercourse with Champier must have shown Servetus that medicine was a more assured means of earning a subsistence than theology, and opened up a far wider field to his ambition than continued service with the typographers. Without utterly neglecting older studies, therefore, he now gave his chief attention to the great and useful art and science of medicine; and we shall find as we proceed that the lessons of such teachers as Joannes Guinterus (Jo. Winter of Andernach), Jacobus Sylvius (J. du Bois), Joannes Fernelius, and others of name and fame in their day, found congenial soil in the receptive mind of the student.
Servetus, indeed, would seem immediately to have made his presence felt in the medical school of Paris; he was at once more than a listener to the prelections of its professors. Associated with no less distinguished an individual than Andrea Vesalius, he was one of Winter of Andernach’s two prosectors, and prepared the subject for each day’s demonstration.
And let not the conjunction of talent that meets us here be overlooked. Vesalius, repudiating the authority of Galen, became the restorer—theCreatorof Modern Anatomy. Servetus, breaking with scholasticism in theology, and freeing himself from the shackles of Greeks and Arabians in practical medicine, inauguratedRational Physiology when he proclaimed the course of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart through the lungs. Working together as friends and fellow students for the Professor of Anatomy, Vesalius and Servetus, through diversity of mental constitution, yet saw things diversely. Vesalius, the observer, abiding by theconcrete, described with rare felicity and truthfulness what he witnessed; Servetus, gifted with genius, aspiring to theidealand inferring consequences, deduced the pulmonary circulation from the structure of the heart and lungs!
Nor were the two men associates only in their studies; they were fellows also in the untoward fate that befel them both in after life; for both may be said to have fallen victims to their zeal. Somewhat precipitate, we may presume, in his eagerness for information, the heart of a young nobleman who had died under his care and whose body Vesalius was inspecting, was either seen to palpitate, or was thought to have palpitated, when touched by the knife of the anatomist. Accused forthwith of murder, it was only by the interference of Philip II. of Spain, whose physician Vesalius was, that a formal trial for manslaughter was commuted for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with confession and absolution at the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre. The penance was undergone, but the pilgrim, homeward bound, suffered shipwreck on the island of Crete, and perished miserably there. Servetus again, as we shall see, in his eagerness to proclaim what he believed to bethe truth, and given no chance for his life, had to abide the still more cruel death of the faggot and stake.
Joannes Guinterus, it is interesting to know, bears honourable testimony to the merits of his two assistants. In the preface to his ‘Anatomical Institutions’ he informs us that ‘he had been most effectually aided in the preparation of the work, first by Andrea Vesalius, a young man, by Hercules! singularly proficient in anatomy; and after him by Michael Villanovanus, distinguished by his literary acquirements of every kind, and scarcely second to any in his knowledge of Galenical doctrine. Under the supervision and with the aid of these two,’ he continues, ‘I have myself examined in the Subject and have shown to the students the whole of the muscles, veins, arteries, and nerves, both of the extremities and internal parts of the body.’43From this we learn whence Servetus had the anatomical knowledge that enabled him as inductive reasoner—true forerunner here of our own immortal Harvey—to proclaim the pulmonary circulation.
The practice of dissecting the human subject had therefore, by this time, extended to France—the bodies of one or more malefactors being now publicly anatomisedin the course of each winter session.44Had we no other evidence of the genius with which Michael Servetus was endowed, beyond the use he made of what he saw in these anatomical demonstrations, we should still feel entitled to speak of him as the most far-sighted physiologist of his age; for he alone of all his contemporaries, though fettered by the prevalent metaphysical theories of life, the soul and the spirits, from which we ourselves have not yet escaped, not only divined, but positively proclaimed the passage of the blood, by way of the lungs, from the right to the left side of the heart, and thence—but stopping short of the whole truth, first proclaimed by Harvey—from the left ventricle of the heart to the body at large. But the book in which his important Induction is contained, though printed in his lifetime,was never published. Seen by none but a few theologians, who took no note of its physiological contents, it remained unknown to the world for nearly a century and a half, after its author had fallen a victim to the hate of Calvin and the intolerance of his age.
With the stimulus of necessity upon him, for he was poor, and the excitement of vanity, with which he was largely endowed, as he could not live on the learning he imbibed from his teachers, Servetus by-and-byappeared before the world as a teacher in his turn. Having by diligence and superior natural capacity, in a singularly short space of time, achieved the degrees of M.A. and M.D., which were required before he could present himself either as Professor or Physician within the domain of the University of Paris, Servetus now came forward as a Lecturer on the Geography of Ptolemy and the science of Astrology—a term which then included the true doctrine of the heavenly bodies as well as the false doctrine of their presumed influence on the life of man and the current of events in the world. In this bold step we have another glimpse of the self-reliant, and it may be, somewhat presumptuous, character of the man; for even as the emancipated novice of the monk’s school and Saragossan professors, when little more than of age, showed himself as Theologian in the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ so did the newly becapped Magister Artium now come forward as Lecturer on Geography and Astrology, and the scarce fledged doctor in physic, as a teacher of his fellows and the world at large, in the art and mystery of treating Disease.
The course of Lectures on Geography and Astrology was a happy thought, and proved highly successful. It was delivered to a large and distinguished audience, and besides supplying the professor with funds for all his wants, became a means of introducing him to friends, influential for good on his future life. Amongst the number of his auditors there was a young ecclesiastic,a scholar and man of talent, Pierre Paumier, who after employment in various offices of trust by his king, Francis the First, was transferred to a position of no less dignity and emolument than that of Archbishop of Vienne in Dauphiny.
Under the auspices of the Archbishop, and as we believe on his invitation, it was that Servetus found a final resting place by his side. Fresh from editing Ptolemy, with the old stores of classic lore he had at command, and of anecdote and general information he had amassed in reading up for his editorial duties, aided by the natural fluency with which we venture to credit him, it is easy to imagine how interesting these Lectures must have been in days when the world was eager for information on the discoveries of the great voyagers and travellers of the age, and when books were still both scarce and costly, and little read by the many.
But Servetus was a Physician as well as Geographer and Astrologer, and not the man to hide any light he had under a bushel. He must appear in connection with his profession, as well as in the accessory field of general knowledge, by writing a book upon some properly medical subject, a business which he set about forthwith under the immediate inspiration of all he had learned from Dr. Champier of Lyons, as well as his professors of Paris.
THE TREATISE ON SYRUPS AND THEIR USE IN MEDICINE.45
The medical world in the early part of the sixteenth century was divided into two great hostile camps, respectively designated Galenists, or followers of the Greeks, and Averrhoists, or disciples of the Arabians; the former swearing by Hippocrates and Galen, the latter by Averrhoes and Avicenna. Servetus’s initiator into matters medical, Champier, was a fervent admirer of the Greeks; and his pupil, led by his classical training as well as his master’s example, naturally attached himself to the same school. Here, nevertheless, as ever, he showed the independence of his nature by having open eyes for any truth the Arabian writers might present; so that we find nothing of servility or one-sidedness in what he has to say.
The treatise in which Villanovanus came before the public in his new capacity of physician was on the practical use of the class of medicines known in those days by the title of Syrups—sweetened decoctions or infusions of different kinds, still in vogue among the French under the name of Tisanes. These syrups appear to have been one of the bones of contention between the two parties, though neither was perfectly agreed in itself as to the indications for their use or of the principles on which they were to be prescribed. This question does not interest us here, and so we leave it; but we turn to the work of Michael Villanovanus for intimations in its style of the intellectual and moral nature of its author.
In his address to the reader he says, ‘I should not have proposed, most learned reader, to take on my weak shoulders this weighty and so much disputed province of the healing art, had I not felt me forced, against my will as it were, to lend my aid in furthering medical studies by a fair defence of Galenical doctrine, and more especially still by my love of truth.... I think it will be found that I have conciliated Galen so far with my own views as to dispel any doubts I may have had of a favourable award, if I have only an equitable judge in my reader. Of this, at all events, I feel well assured that no studious person who carefully weighs what is here set forth will repent him of his reading.’ This is not amiss from a Doctor of a year’sstanding! But it is in his Preface to the work that Michael Villanovanus, as we apprehend him, comes still more particularly before us. Aware, as he says, of the fate that so often befals the meddler in a quarrel not his own, and displaying a commendable amount of caution, not without a spice of mock modesty, our author is here considerate enough to tell us that ‘he does not intend to offer himself as censor in the controversy, between the Galenists and Averrhoists, and by finding something to object to in the conclusions of each, to have them both fall foul of him as an enemy;’ after which he proceeds, characteristically still, to say, ‘but that I may not withhold from others that which I possess myself and gratefully acknowledge, which may be of use to my fellow men, I throw aside fear and proclaim what I believe to be the truth.’
The ‘Syruporum Universa Ratio,’ or general Rationale of Syrups, is in truth a very learned little book, extremely well written; much of it, as becomes the young practitioner, having reference to the writings of predecessors of the highest authority in medical science. Hippocrates and Galen, above all others, are freely quoted, and their views discussed, for Servetus was ‘nothing if not critical,’ and a variorum reading or two to show his scholarship is proposed. But he also refers to Avicenna, not thinking it amiss to learn of the enemy, and to Paul of Aegina, Monardus and others, by which he proclaims the extent of his reading,and his readiness to imbibe knowledge at every source.
I looked with interest for some physiological hint or statement in this book, on Syrups or Diet drinks, that might have heralded the brilliant exposition contained in the latest product of his genius—the Christianismi Restitutio or Restoration of Christianity—concerning the way in which the blood from the right reaches the left ventricle of the heart through the lungs, but in vain. We must presume nevertheless that he was already possessed of the anatomical facts on which his later induction is founded. The only physiological reference I discovered in the book on Syrups was to the Mesentery as giving origin to the veins—a step in advance of his predecessors, with whom the liver was the source as it was also the laboratory of the blood, as the veins were the channels for its distribution to the body.
It is not uninteresting, however, to observe the same tendency towards unity or oneness here, in the domain of positive knowledge, which we discover pervading Servetus’s other works that lose themselves in the realm of metaphysical abstraction. He will not acknowledge two or any greater number of concoctions or digestions, whether in health or disease, such as were generally admitted in his day. The processes that take place in disease he declares to be of the same nature, though they are perverted, as those that occur in the healthy body. Diseases are therefore nothing more than perversionsof natural functions, not new entities introduced into the body; a conclusion which, on physiological grounds, he sums up in these words: ‘The rationale in the maturation of disease and in the digestion of the food is one and the same.’46
THE MEDICAL FACULTY OF PARIS SUE VILLANOVANUS FOR LECTURING ON JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY.
Servetus’s fate on starting in life was opposition; and how should it have been otherwise?—he found himself through superior endowment and higher culture antagonistic to almost all he saw around him in the world. We have already had him met as a trespasser on their domain by the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg, and we have now to find him looked on as an intruder by the Medical Faculty of Paris. The lecturer on Geography and Astrology had attracted a large amount of public attention, and the author of the book on Syrups began to get into vogue as a practitioner of medicine. The book had in fact been as well received as the lectures; it was extensively read, much commended at the time, and reprinted oftener than once in after years. No wonder, therefore, that Michel Villeneuve M.D. had now as many eyes upon him in Paris as Michael Servetus had had in other days in Switzerland. Before he could well look about him, the whole faculty of Physicians and the heads of the University of Paris were in array against him.
It seems that he had gone out of his way in his lectures to say something disrespectful of the doctors, his contemporaries, accusing them of ignorance of many things necessary to the successful practice of their profession, particularly of Astronomy, or more properly Astrology, a science in which Villeneuve plumed himself as being a master. The doctors naturally enough complained of such impropriety, and had him cited before their council. There he was told that something more of respectful bearing was due from him to men who had been his masters; and above all that he was transgressing the boundaries of true science and common sense in making so much of Astrology. The Dean of the Faculty is even said to have had him several times privately before him, and warned him of the difficulties he would inevitably fall into, if he continued casting nativities and prescribing for the ailments of his patients from the aspects of the stars; for this, it appears, was the principal element in his medical practice. Servetus, unhappily for himself, was not one of those who could take even friendly advice in good part. As credulous as he was sceptical, and believing implicitly in himself and in stellar influences, he not only made no submission, but said that his ill-wishers should rue their opposition.
The doctors on their part not only gave no heed to his threats, but publicly denounced him from their chairs as an impostor and wind-bag; with the consequence of arousing him to self-defence, and with hisready pen setting him to work upon a pamphlet, in which he did not fail to lay bare some of the sore places in the persons of his adversaries, characterising them as mannerless and unlettered, and even holding them up in their ignorance as very pests of society. Once in the hands of the printer, Villeneuve’s purpose to expose his detractors through the dreaded press became known; and such alarm does his meditated attack appear to have excited that the Faculty of Physicians, calling the Senate of the University to their side, petitioned the Parliament of Paris to forbid the publication of the pamphlet, as well as to interdict its author from continuing to lecture on Astrology, which they now characterised as Divination.
The Parliament, with becoming judicial impartiality, would take no step in the matter until they had heard Villeneuve in his defence and had something tangible, such as the pamphlet which it was sought to suppress, before them. Nothing more was done, consequently, than the issuing of a summons to Villeneuve to appear at the bar of the house on a certain day and give an account of himself. This gave him all he required: time to have his pamphlet printed. Keeping the compositors at work, with a promise of higher pay if they used despatch, it was not only ready before the day of citation came round, but had been distributed gratis in numbers to the public as well as to the members of the medical profession. They reckoned without their host who thought that Michel Villeneuvewas to be cowed by opposition, however imposingly headed.
The doctors were naturally excessively wroth with this daring move on the part of the man they desired to crush. He had not awaited the decision of the Parliament; and neither now did they pause; for believing they had a hold upon him on the score of heresy, implied in the practice of judicial astrology or divination, they had him summoned before the Inquisitor of the king as an enemy to the Church, and contemner of its statutes. There was no regularly established Inquisition at this time in France; but papal inquisitors, often Italians by birth, were commonly enough found accredited by the Holy See, with the sanction of the Sovereign, to the large towns of the country. There they held courts before which cases of imputed heresy were tried and adjudged—the decisions come to, however, being always made subject to revision by the civil tribunals of the realm. Nay, there was a right of demurrage to the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, at the option of the party incriminated, were he minded to be tried by the ordinary civil, rather than the extraordinary ecclesiastical, court.
We might have imagined that Michael Servetus, with the experience he had had of ecclesiastical incapacity to hear reason and ‘true judgment give,’ as he interpreted it, would have paused before venturing to appear before the inquisitor of the king; but so safe must Michel Villeneuve have felt against a charge ofheresy at this time, and so secure in his new designation, that he did not hesitate to obey the summons; although we learn that had he been so minded, he might as a member of the Faculty of Physicians have even disregarded it entirely. He appeared accordingly at the proper moment; and so well did he play his part, so thoroughly did he satisfy the inquisitor of the king that he was a good Christian, that he left the court with flying colours, absolved of all suspicion of heresy, to the utter discomfiture of his accusers, who had now nothing for it but patiently to wait the award of the Parliament.
Before this tribunal, acting it would seem as a court of justice, a suit was regularly instituted, with the Rector of the University of Paris and the Dean and Faculty of Physic of the same as pursuers, on the one part, and Michael Villanovanus as defendant, on the other. For the University and Faculty, it was alleged that judicial astrology, otherwise to be styled divination, is forbidden by various statutes, as well canonical and divine as civil, the penalty for practising the same being death by fire, and that the defendant, a man of learning, and so incapacitated from pleading ignorance of these statutes, had notoriously lectured both in public and private on certain books of divination, among others, on the works entitled ‘De Aleabiticis’ and ‘De Divificationibus,’ both of which are full of divination.
It was alleged further, that he had been known tomake forecasts for various persons in respect of their fortunes from their nativities, on the assumption that according to the day and the hour of a man’s birth, and the aspect of the heavens at the time, would fortune of a favourable or adverse kind befal him; all of which by the Faculty of Theology is held highly reprehensible. That for his lectures and lessons, moreover, he takes money and attracts numerous auditors, who, seduced by the pleasantness of the poison he sells, have been debauched and led to forsake the true philosophy of Pico de Mirandola, who declares divination to be the most pestilent of frauds, degrading philosophy, invalidating religion, strengthening superstition, corrupting morals, and making men miserable slaves instead of free men.
Not stopping short at such public and private misdeeds, continue the pursuers, he has written and had printed a certain apology or defence of divination,47with his name attached, which is of a highly objectionable character in every respect; the Theological Faculty declaring in addition that the concluding sentence of this apology has an extremely suspicious appearance, couched as it is in these words: ‘On the following night Mars is eclipsed by the moon, near the star called the King, in the constellation of Leo; whence I predict that in the course of this year the hearts of the Lions, i.e. the princes, will be greatly moved; that with Mars in the ascendant war will prevail,and much havoc be done by fire and sword; that the Church will suffer tribulation, several princes die, and pestilence and other evils abound. To languish, to mourn, to die—all of good or ill that comes to man proceeds from heaven.’
The petition of the pursuers on the above showing therefore is, that the defendant, Villanovanus, be interdicted for the future from professing and practising judicial astrology, whether in public or private; that he be forbidden further to circulate his pamphlet against the Faculty, and commanded to call in all unsold copies; that for what has passed he own himself to blame, and be enjoined for the future to bear himself respectfully towards the Faculty of Physic, to which he belongs.
In his address to the court on behalf of his client, Villanovanus’s counsel opined that the Faculty of Physic had descended somewhat from the dignity that became so great a body in taking steps against one, a stranger, who had been attracted to Paris by the science that distinguished it, of which he had heard so much. The cause of the hostility of the Faculty against his client, he said, was owing to his having insisted on the necessity of a knowledge of astronomy to the Physician. This had been turned into a knowledge of judicial astrology by his enemies; but there were many of his hearers who were ready to testify that he had never even mentioned judicial astrology. As to the paragraph about the Lions, he had onlygiven it as illustrating the rules of astrological science, and the knowledge he has of the possible influence of the stars; but he would by no means insist that events of the kind named must happen as matter of necessity. In all this, however, he is ready to submit himself to the judgment of the court, and on his words being pronounced objectionable, he is willing to be set right. With regard to what he says in his apology about physicians being the plagues of society, he of course only aims at the ignorant and unskilful among them; the saying, indeed, is none of his, but Galen’s, who speaks of the ignorant practitioners of medicine of his day in precisely the same words.
The judgment of the court is nearly in the terms of the counsel’s address for the prosecution. His statements appear to have been taken as trustworthy without further evidence adduced. Villanovanus is ordered to call in his pamphlet and deposit the copies with the proper officer of the court; to pay all honour and respect to the Faculty of Physic in its collective and individual capacity, saying and writing nothing unbecoming of it, but conducting himself at all times peacefully and reverently towards its members; the doctors, on their part, being enjoined to treat Villanovanus gently and amiably, as parents treat their children. Villanovanus is then expressly inhibited and forbidden to appear in public, or in any other way, as a professor or practitioner of judicial astrology, otherwise called divination; he is to confine himself in hisdiscussions of astrological subjects to the influence of the heavenly bodies on the course of the seasons and other natural phenomena, and not to meddle with questions or judgments of stellar influences on individuals or events, under pain of being deprived of the privileges he enjoys as a graduate of the University of Paris.
Done this 18th of March, 1538.
CHARLIEU—ATTAINMENT OF HIS THIRTIETH YEAR—HIS VIEWS OF BAPTISM.
This decree and interdict of the Parliament of Paris could not have been satisfactory to Servetus. We need not question his belief in the reality of judicial astrology, nor doubt of the application of its presumed principles having been found profitable by him; for a longing to pry into futurity is among the infirmities of human nature, and a belief in the influence of the stars on the fortunes of men was all but universal in the age of Servetus. Nor is it even now entirely extinct in the world; for the ‘Vox Stellarum’ is still regularly printed in England, and finds a sale by thousands every year among the superstitious and the ill-educated of our population. Hardly, moreover, does a child come into the world among us now without a great fuss being made as to the precise moment of the birth; though the particulars obtained may never be thought of afterwards, nor the end for which they were sought be even surmised. But when we look on the cornelian and clay cylinders dug up in such numbers from the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, engraved with the accreditedfigures of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the emblematical representations of the constellations, such as Cassiopæia, Hercules Ingeniculus, Ursa Major, Leo, Auriga, Cepheus, and others, still depicted on our celestial globes, we learn how old was the belief that every man and woman who came into the world was influenced in after life by the star under which he or she was born.48
Villeneuve might possibly have continued lecturing on astrology, composing horoscopes, and casting nativities, as others did in his day, had he but had the prudence to control his tongue, and not hold up his brethren of the Faculty of Physic to contempt by proclaiming their ignorance of a science in which he himself excelled and held necessary to treat disease in the most effectual manner; but he had been indiscreet, and they had won the day. He could no longer go on making forecasts for a credulous public from the aspect of the heavens at the moment of their birth, and he must show himself forward to call in the unsold copies of his pamphlet which had been found so offensive, perhaps because so well directed and so true. It would have interested us in the present day to have known precisely wherein the sting of this apology lay; but like others among the host of ephemeral publications, hurriedly produced to serve a purpose of the hour, it has perished. There were few collectors of ballads, broadsides, and tracts, three hundred and fiftyyears ago; and all the searches for a copy of the philippic against the Parisian Faculty have proved in vain.49
From the estimate we are led to form of the self-sufficing and defiant character of Michael Servetus, as displayed in his after life, we are disposed to wonder that he did not continue to dispute the field of Paris with his opponents. He had published his clever and scholarly treatise on Syrups, and through it achieved a title to consideration as a learned practitioner of medicine in the regular way. Such a man as he would soon have lived down the stigma his fellows had fastened upon him as a fortune-teller from the stars, and he must by and by have taken his place in the front rank of his profession. But the physician comes slowly into practice when public confidence is courted through the gate of science. Horoscope-making was probably the main source of Villeneuve’s income; and this forbidden, and the golden stream it fed, arrested, the cold shoulder shown him by his professional brethren, and the averted looks of the public at the man condemned by the Parliament of Paris,—all was against him; his malignant star had culminated, and he seems to have thought it best to yield to fate, and give way.
It must have been immediately after the conclusion of the suit against him that Servetus left Paris; for we have news of him in the course of the same year(1538) as a practitioner of medicine in the town of Charlieu, distant about twelve French miles from the city of Lyons. He may have been led to this retreat through knowledge gained in the course of his former residence in Lyons; but he did not continue long there—certainly for not more than a year and a half, or so. Could we trust the report of one who speaks of him as ‘a most arrogant and insolent person,’ he must have embroiled himself with some of the more influential people of Charlieu, who, as said, made his position so uncomfortable that he was forced to quit and go farther afield.50But Villeneuve had earned for himself an ill name by his dispute with the University and Medical Faculty of Paris; and coming from the quarter it does, we give no credit to the tale, led as we are by what we know to find a much better reason for the remove than any fresh personal dispute, though there does seem to have been something of the kind complicating matters, as well as certain ‘love passages,’ which, as they came to nothing, may have rendered longer residence in the place unpleasant.
The residence of Villeneuve in Charlieu, however, is not without interest, as giving us a further insight into the character and predominant pious nature of the man. In the course of the year 1539, which he passed at Charlieu, Michael Servetus attained the thirtieth year of his age, the year according to his religious tenets in which only baptism could be rightly received. ‘He who would follow the example of Christ,’ says he inhis latest work, ‘ought now to betake him to this Laver of Regeneration—Lavacrum Regenerationis;’ and from the particular account he gives of the manner in which they who think with him on the subject of baptism perform the rite, we can scarcely doubt of his having found occasion to have himself privately baptized by some Anabaptist acquaintance he had made. Servetus was unquestionably a man of so pious a nature, so sincere a believer in the divinity of Christ, according to his way of interpreting it, and so firmly persuaded that the closest possible imitation of him was necessary to salvation, that we may feel assured he found means to have a rite he held so indispensable properly performed at the proper moment. It must have been in the consciousness of having himself done what he thought right in this particular, that we find him by and by urgently exhorting Calvin, with whom he had entered into correspondence, and probably knew to be of his own age, to have himself baptized anew. ‘Christ,’ he says, ‘as an infant, was circumcised, but not baptized; and this is a great mystery; in his thirtieth year, however, he received baptism; thereby setting us the example, and teaching us that before this age no one is a fit recipient of the rite that gives the kingdom of heaven to man. It were fit and proper in you, therefore, would you show true faith in Christ, to submit yourself to baptism, and so receive the gift of the Holy Spirit promised through this means.’ (Epist. xv. ad Jo. Calvinum, Christ. Restit., p. 615.)