68 ΐ ORIENTATION.
last (1553),' and escaped earlier death only by concealment, practicing medicine under a fictitious name and the protection of a Catholic archbishop. He had abused all trinitarian Christians, as tritheists and atheists; he had denounced the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as a dream of St. Augustin, a fiction of popery, an invention of the devil, and a three-headed Cerberus.? He had attacked with equal fury infant-baptism, as a detestable abomination, a killing of the Holy Spirit, an abolition of regeneration, and overthrow of the entire kingdom of Christ, and pronounced a woe on all baptizers of infancy who close the kingdom of heaven against mankind. He had been previously condemned to the stake by the Roman Catholic tribunal of the inquisition, after a regular trial, in the archiepiscopal city of Vienne in France, partly on the ground of his letters to Calvin procured from Geneva, and burned in effigy with his last book after his escape. He then rushed blindly into the hands of Calvin, whom — he denounced, during the trial, as a liar, a hypocrite, and a Simon Magus, with a view, apparently, to overthrow his power, in league with his enemies, the party of the Libertines, which had then the majority in the council of Geneva.*
Considering all these circumstances Calvin’s conduct is not only explained, but even justified in part. He acted in harmony with
1 Christianismi Restitutio .... MDLIII., secretly printed at Vienne in France, with his initials on the last page, M.S. V. (7. e.: Villanovanus).
2 Such blasphemy of the Trinity appeared to be blasphemy of the Deity itself. Hence Beza calls Servetus “ille sacre Triadis, id est omnis vere Deitatis hostis, adeoque monstrum ex omnibus quantumvis rancidis et portentosis heresibus conflatum.” Calv. Vita, ad a. 15538. He charges his hook with being “full of blasphemies.”’ Servetus called Jesus “the Son of the eternal God,” but obstinately refused to call him “the eternal Son of God,” in other words, to admit his eternal divinity.
3“The year 1553,” says Beza in Calvini Vita, ad a. 1553, “by the impatience and malice of the factious [the Libertines] was a year so full of trouble that not only the church, but the republic of Geneva, came within a hair’s breadth of ruin. .. . All power had fallen into their hands, that nothing seemed to hinder them from attaining the ends for which they had so long been striving.” Then he mentions the trial of Servetus as the other danger, which was aggravated by the first.
§ 11. PROTESTANTISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 69
the public law and orthodox sentiment of his age, and should therefore not be condemned more than his contemporaries, who would have done the same in his position."
But all the humane sentiments are shocked again by the atrocity of the execution ; while sympathy is roused for the unfortunate sufferer who died true to his conviction, reconciled to his enemies, and with the repeated prayer in the midst of the flames: “ Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me!”
1 H. Tollin, a Reformed clergyman of Magdeburg, the most enthusiastic and voluminous advocate of Servetus and his system, admits this, saying (Charakterbild M. Servet’s, Berlin, 1876, p.6): “ Nicht Calvin ist schuldig der That, sondern der Protestantismus seiner Zeit.’ Another apologist, Dardier (in Lichtenberger’s “‘ Encyclopédie” XI. 581), says the same: C’est la Réforme tout entiére qui est coupable.” The famous Christian philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, went further. In one of his last utterances, in his Table-Talk, sub Jan. 3, 1834 (to which a friend directed my attention), he expressed his views as follows: “I have known books written on tolerance, the proper title of which would be—intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,—those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves ?—Is it fitting to run Jesus Christ in a silly parallel with Socrates—the Being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom I am an humble unit, take to be their Redeemer, with an Athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in Plato and Xenophon ?—And then to hitch LatimEeR and SERveETUus together! To be sure, there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is I cannot see. What ground is there for throwing the odium of Servetus’s death upon Calvin alone?—Why, the mild Melanchthon wrote to Calvin, expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the German Reformers; the Swiss churches advised the punishment in formal letters, and I rather think there are letters from the English divines, approving Calvin’s conduct !—Before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the Reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the Reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. Besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus. He was a rabid enthusiast, and did everything he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the Christian church. He called the Trinity triceps monstrum et Cerberum quemdam tri-partitum, and so on.”