734 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
He was fully conscious of a divine mission to overthrow the tyranny of the papal and Protestant Antichrist, and to restore Christianity to its primitive purity. " The task we have undertaken," he says in the preface, "is sublime in majesty, easy in perspicuity, and certain in demonstration ; 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 alone, through whom alone do we plainly discern how the deity of the Word and the Spirit may be apprehended in man. . . . We shall now see God, unseen before, with his face revealed, and behold him shining in ourselves, if we open the door and enter in. It is high time to open this door and this way of the light, without which no one can read the sacred Scriptures, or know God, or become a Christian." Then he gives a brief summary of topics, and closes the preface with this prayer : —
" O Christ Jesus, Son of God, who hast been given to us from heaven, who in thyself makest the Deity visibly manifest, open thyself to thy servant that so great a manifestation may be truly understood. Grant unto me now, who entreats tliee, thy good Spirit, and the efficacious word ; direct my mind and my pen that I may declare the glory of thy divinity and give expression to the true faith concerning thee. The cause is thine, and it is by a certain divine impulse that I am led to treat of thy glory from the Father, and the glory of tliy Spirit. I once began to treat of it, and now I am constrained to do so again; for the time is, in truth, completed, as I shall now show to all the pious, from the certainty of the thing itself and from the manifest signs of the times. Thou hast taught us that a lamp must not be hidden. Woe unto me if I do not preach the gospel. It concerns the common cause of all Christians, to which we are all bound."
He forwarded the manuscript to a publisher in Basel, Marrinus, who declined it in a letter, dated April 9, 1552, because it could not be safely published in that city at that time. He then made an arrangement with Balthasar Arnoullet, bookseller and publisher at Vienne, and Guillaume Gu^roult, his brother-in-law and manager of his printing establishment, who had run away from Geneva for bad conduct. He assured them that there were no errors in the
§ 146. "THE KESTITUTIOX OF CHRISTIANITY." 735
book, and that, on the contrary, it was directed against the doctrines of Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and other heretics. He agreed to withhold his and their names and the name of the place of publication from the title-page. He assumed the whole of the expense of publication, and paid them in advance the sum of one hundred gold dollars. No one in France knew at that time that his real name was Servetus, and that he was the author of the work, " On the Errors of the Trinity."
The " Restitution " was secretly printed in a small house, away from the known establishment, within three or four months, and finished on the third of January, 1553. He corrected the proofs himself, but there are several typographical errors in it. The whole impression of one thousand copies was made up into bales of one hundred copies each ; five bales were sent as white paper to Pierre Martin, typefounder of Lyons, to be forwarded by sea to Genoa and Venice ; another lot to Jacob Bestet, bookseller at Chatillon ; and a third to Frankfort. Calvin obtained one or more copies, probably from his friend Frellon of Lyons. ^
The first part of the " Restitution " is a revised and enlarged edition of the seven books " On the Errors of the Trinity." The seven books are condensed into five ; and these are followed by two dialogues on the Trinity between Michael and Peter, Avhich take the place of the sixth and seventh books of the older work. The other part of the " Restitution," which covers nearly two-thirds of the volume (pp. 287-734), is new, and embraces three books on Faith and the Righteousness of the Kingdom of Christ (287-354), four books on Regeneration and the Reign of Antichrist (355-576), thirty letters to Calvin (577-664), Sixty Signs of Antichrist (664-670), and the Apology to Melanchthon on the Mystery of the Trinity and on Ancient Discipline
1 These facts came out at the trial of Vienne. On the few rcmainiug copies of the original edition of the Restitutio see above, § 136, p. 682.