714 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
by the writings of tlie Reformers. He may have read some tracts of Luther, which were early translated into Spanish, but he does not quote from them.^
We next find Servetus in the employ of Juan Quintana, a Franciscan friar and confessor to the Emperor Charles V. He seems to have attended his court at the coronation by Pope Clement VH. in Bologna (1529), and on the journey to the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, which forms an epoch in the history of the Lutheran Reformation.^ At Augsburg he may have seen Melanchthon and other leading Lutherans, but he was too young and unknown to attract much attention.
In the autumn of 1530 he was dismissed from the service of Quintana ; we do not know for what reason, probably on suspicion of heresy.
We have no account of a conversion or moral struggle in any period of his life, such as the Reformers passed through. He never was a Protestant, either Lutheran or Reformed, but a radical at war with all orthodoxy. A mere youth of twenty-one or two, he boldly or impudently struck out an independent path as a Reformer of the Reformation. The Socinian society did not yet exist ; and even there he would not have felt at home, nor would he have long been tolerated. Nominally, he remained in the Roman Church, and felt no scruple about conforming to its rites. As he stood alone, so he died alone, leaving an influence, but no school nor sect.
From Germany Servetus went to Switzerland and spent some time at Basel. There he first ventilated his heresies on the trinity and the divinity of Christ.
1 ToUin conjectures that he had read the writintrs of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer, and was especially influenced by Erasmus.
2 See Tollin, Die Beichtvdter Kaiser Karls V., three short papers in the "Magazin fiir die Lit. des Auslandes," 1874, and Serret auf dem Reichstag zu Augsburg, in Thelemann's " Evang. Reform. Kirchenzeitung," 1876, No. 17-- 24.
§ 141. THE BOOK AGAINST THE HOLY TRINITY. 7l0
He importuned (Ecolampadius with interviews and letters, hoping to convert him. I^ut Gicolampadius was startled and horrified. He informed his friends, Bucer, Zwingli, and Bullinger, who happened to be at Basel in October, 1530, that he had been troubled of late by a hot-headed Spaniard, who denied the divine trinity and the eternal divinity of our Saviour. Zwingli advised him to try to convince Servetus of his error, and by good and wholesome arguments to win him over to the truth. Qicolampadius said that he could make no impression upon the haughty, daring, and contentious man. Zwingli replied: " This is indeed a thing insufferable in the Church of God. Therefoie do everything possible to prevent the spread of such dreadful blasphemy." Zwingli never saw the objectionable book in print.
Servetus sought to satisfy (Ecolampadius by a misleading confession of faith, but the latter was not deceived by the explanations and exhorted him to "confess the Son of God to be coequal and coeternal with the Father " ; otherwise he could not acknowledge him as a Christian.
§ 141. The Book against the Holy Trinity,
Servetus was too vain and obstinate to take advice. In the beginning of 1531, he secured a publisher for his book on the "Errors of the Trinity," Conrad Koenig, who had shops at Basel and Strassburg, and who sent the manuscript to Secerius, a printer at Hagenau in Alsace. Servetus went to that place to read the proof. He also visited Bucer and Capito at Strassburg, who received him with courtesy and kindness and tried to convert him, but in vain.
In July, 1531, the book appeared under the name of the author, and was furnished to the trade at Strassburg, Frankfort, and Basel, but nobody knew where and by whom it was published. Suspicion fell upon Basel.
This book is a very original and, for so young a man, very remarkable treatise on the Trinity and Incarnation in oppo-