CHAPTER XVII.

His murder yet was but fantastical,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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 forit. 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 MichaelServetus 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-disposedperson 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,’60often 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 thiskind 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 betteror 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 repudiatedin 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 ofhimself 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 λὀγος 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-platonicand 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

Offspring of heaven firstborn,Or of the eternal coeternal beam;Since God is light,And never but in unapproached light,Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

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

And thou, my Word, begotten Son, by theeThis I perform: speak thou and be it done.

Creation ended, he continues:—

The filial Son arrived and sat him downWith his great Father!

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!

Coming to a more particular analysis of the ‘Restitutio,’ we find the first book treating of the manJesus, 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 [Χρίστος, 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,—υἵος Θεοῦ—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 himis 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.

Having spoken of God and Christ, he treats next of the Trinity. In the beginning, it is said, was the word, Ὁ λὀγος, 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; Christbeing 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 discussesthe 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.

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 itsESSEor essential being to every existing thing—to inanimate creation, to living creatures in general, and to man in especial.’

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 asnatural, 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 thevitalspirit, whose seat or dwelling-place is the heart and arteries. The third, theanimalspirit, 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 fœtus; 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 materialas 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 beingnow 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 fœtus 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 itseem 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 thevena portæto thevena cavatakes 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 thevitalbegins to be changed into theanimalspirit, 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 wonderfullyand 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 areturnof 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 fœtus, so in the adult are they nourished from another quarter.’ To Servetusas 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 theiranastomoses.’ Servetus may consequently have had anintimationof 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 fœtus 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 ofafferentcanals of the blood from the heart of the fœtus to the placenta of the mother, consequently, Servetus believed the umbilical arteries to beefferentchannels of the vital spirit of the mother to the heart of the fœtus. 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 fœtal 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 abroadin 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 JewishScriptures 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 theletterof the New Testament as the source of their faith, the warrant for the conclusions they built upon its text. But he declared thatthere 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 asCause, 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 andobject 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 RomanCatholic 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 thatAdam’s transgression brought no real guiltiness on mankind; for such can never be incurred throughanother’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 andscheolby 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 wordatonementin 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 ascomprehensive 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.’

Justificationis the dogma that is next entered on, and is said to be bygrace: ‘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.’

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, toRegeneration. 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 everlastingfire? 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 theLaver of Regenerationbefore 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 thebreadas bread and its transmutation into merewhiteness. ‘I rather wonder,’ says he, ‘whether Satan was the circumcisor of common sense from the brains of those who ofbreadmakenot-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 LutheransImpanators, and the CalvinistsTropists, the Roman Catholics being of courseTransubstantiators. 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 weby 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 theletter, 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 theCupto 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).

Back to Index Next