But Calvin did not spare his friends any more than his enemies. Ami Perrin, his faithful supporter and now 'captain-general,' with his wife, a member of the great family of the Favres, went a-dancing. Calvin declared that the Favres were presuming on rank and wealth to put themselves above the law, and all the parties concerned were imprisoned, to the great delight, we are told,' of the populace (which is generally pleased when it sees its betters sent to gaol). But Perrin henceforward was Calvin's bitterest foe, and his wife, a woman of spirit, told the Reformer her opinion of him in plain language: 'Oh, you wicked man,' said she, you would like to drink the blood of our family; but you will be turned out of Geneva before we are.' The prophecy was not fulfilled. A charge of treason brought against Perrin, and supported by a French refugee-Maigret, surnamed 'the Magnificent' and a friend of Calvin-did, it is true, fail and recoil on the head of its propagator; but the result of the trial of Gruet, half madman and half atheist, who had, schoolboy fashion, stuck an abusive placard into Calvin's pulpit, was wholly in the dictator's favour. He was beheaded, and his death-warrant was signed by two strong opponents of the Reformer, Vandel and Philibert Berthelier.

This was in 1547. Four years later the position of affairs had changed, and when Jerome Bolsec dared publicly to impugn the doctrine of Predestination, Calvin and all his ministers could effect no more than his banishment, while the Protestant cantons, who were appealed to in the matter, dealt somewhat faithfully with the preachers of Geneva and their violent letters. Indeed from 1551 onward the Calvinist cause appears at a low ebb. Bolsec had many sympathizers, including Calvin's special friend de Falais, and the party of Liberty profited from the disgust caused by his trial. Preachers were excluded from the General Council, and an attempt was made, on the score of economy, to reduce their salaries, which was only frustrated by a disgraceful measure authorizing the sale of public offices. Alien refugees were forbidden to bear arms; and Calvin with his customary Choisy, op. cit., p. 81.

1

exaggeration declared that he dared no longer invite the persecuted to Geneva. It needed a sacrifice to revive the drooping cause, and the victim was found in Servetus. That Calvin had years before expressed the intention of getting this man killed if ever he came to Geneva matters little he talked of lesser men in the same strain; and the question is not of what he said, but of what he did, and as to that Dr. Willis' book, though not impartial, can leave us in no doubt whatever.

Michael Servetus was a fool of genius: a Spaniard of Aragon, with the virtues and some of the vices of his race. The point in his character which strikes the man of common sense is his trustful stupidity, coupled with a perfect genius for lying. The very name under which he lived for twenty years or more was a false one, taken from a place where he sometimes said he was born, and sometimes not. Attached to the suite of a cardinal, he must needs earn expulsion by writing a book against the Trinity, which he was surprised to find did not appeal to Oecolampadius. Taking to medicine he discovered (in part) the circulation of the blood, though, thanks to Calvin, the book in which he enounced it survives in two copies only; and promptly spoiled his own prospects by dabbling in astrology. But the crowning and fatal folly of his life was committed when, living peacefully under the protection of the Archbishop of Vienne, he forced his acquaintance and his views-Anabaptist, Arian, and Pantheistic-on the dictator of Geneva, whom he had personally offended many years before. He insisted on a correspondence which soon degenerated into hot controversy, and after calling Calvin' blasphemer,'' true Jew,' and (as excluding unbaptized children from heaven) thief and robber' not only entrusted to him the manuscript of his new Antitrinitarian work, the Christianismi Restitutio, but returned him a copy of his own Institutes with opprobrious marginal notes.

To our thinking, Calvin's conduct in the trial of Servetus at Geneva is not so hateful as his attempt to get him condemned by the Romanists. Had he succeeded, an enemy would have been quietly removed from his path, and one

more victim would have been credited to the intolerance of the Papacy. Indeed, had it not been for his personal spite, the escaped heretic would probably have been welcomed at Geneva, without regard to his peculiar tenets, as a bird escaped from the fowler, and lost among the crowd of refugees. Of these, one, William Trie, was early in 1553 in correspondence with a cousin named Arneys, at Lyons, who was trying hard to bring him back to the Roman faith. On February 26 a letter was written, nominally by Trie, which has affixed an everlasting stigma on the character of John Calvin.' Under the cloak of reproach for the carelessness of Rome regarding real heresy, it denounces Villeneuve (he then called himself) as the notorious Servetus-Calvin had divined that secret—and gives particulars of the printing of his new book with all the malignant minuteness of the informer. The letter was accompanied by two leaves of the newly printed (and not yet circulated) Christianismi Restitutio including the table of contents-matter enough for prosecution. But worse followed. Arneys at once set the heresyhunters on foot and asked Trie for further evidence; Trie sent the manuscript which Servetus had entrusted to his

1 To the fair-minded man who has the letters (given in full by Dyer, App. iv.) before him, only one conclusion is possible. Calvin's early apologists were shameless. Henry (iii. 140), speaking of Trie's sending the leaves, says, 'Nothing else could have been talked of at Geneva except this book. Any number of copies could be procured from Stephanus [Viret had one-and that was at Lausanne]. Servetus had flooded the world with them. That tone has been dropped, but Mr. Irwin (p. 164, n.) refers to an article by M. Neuss in the Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français (Sept., Oct., 1908) as triumphantly vindicating Calvin. A few extracts may suffice. P. 398 : Trie is surprised at the use made of his confidential communications' [the italics are M. Neuss'], and forthwith proceeds to send more. P. 403 Les textes que Calvin se laisse arracher ne sont pas des textes confidentiels' (but what of the letters?), and (ibid.) Calvin saw in the denunciation 'un moyen suprême de sauver la tête de ces jeunes gens' (five young Protestants then under sentence of death in France) 'en rassurant ceux qui accusaient les protestants de laisser détruire tous les fondemens de la loi.'

A third letter of Trie's, not referred to in the text, gives, besides some false particulars as to the life of Servetus, certain true ones which could only be known to Calvin.

enemy and the thirty letters he had written, obtained with great difficulty from Master Calvin, who it is added 'thinks it his duty rather to convince heresy by sound teaching than to pursue it by such means,' viz. the sword-a fine sentiment, marred by the ensuing exhortation to 'seize his person and put him on his trial.'

Seized he was and put on his trial, where he lied like the foolish creature he was, denying first his identity with Servetus and then the printing of a book of which the judges had two leaves in their hands. But though Cardinal Tournon of Lyons was delighted at the idea of one heretic getting another burned, his Grace of Vienne was not minded so to sacrifice his protégé, and Servetus received a hint to walk out of prison through the garden, which he did, and went, of all places in the world, to Geneva, while the inquisitors confiscated his book and burned it (and him in effigy) in a slow fire.

What took the man into the lion's den and kept him there for a month it is impossible to say. He knew that Calvin had been his betrayer. Possibly, but not probably, the Anti-Calvinists thought they could use him: they certainly did not save him; more probably mere foolhardiness took him to the city, and induced him on an August evening to shew his face in church. Calvin heard of it and promptly had him arrested, instituting the prosecution against him through one of his own servants. The story of the trial is too well known to be repeated here. Calvin was the real prosecutor, and the charges were sometimes frivolous, as when the prisoner was charged with giving the lie to Moses by denying that Canaan ever flowed with milk and honey. Of this the vile dog,' says Calvin,' wiping his muzzle, said, Let us pass to the next; no harm in that.' But other counts were serious. Yet the judges would not condemn till they had taken the opinions of the Protestant cantons. This Calvin, with bitter recollections of Bolsec's escape, first opposed, and when opposition failed, actually wrote to the cantons beforehand to secure a verdict.

Servetus died in torment, proving his heresy, as it was said, by his dying exclamation, Jesu, Son of the eternal

God, have mercy on me.' As a rule, the theologians approved of his execution; laymen considered it a murder; and Calvin himself was so uneasy about it that he defended it, and the general principle of killing heretics, in a not very successful book, quoting the instances of Nebuchadnezzar and our Lord as justifying him. He had already in his well-known letter to the Protector Somerset urged the necessity of using the sword against Papists and Anabaptists, and his exhortation was followed, if not obeyed, by the lamentable burning of Joan of Kent. But right or wrong, Servetus' trial and execution proved the deathblow to the Liberal party in Geneva. Their weakness had been displayed in their failure to save him, and within two years advantage was taken of a chance riot to bring against them charges of conspiracy which ended in the execution of four of their leaders and the exile of hundreds of the most patriotic men of Geneva. Calvin reigned supreme; but he had sacrificed the reputation of a lifetime to the satisfaction of personal spite, and to political opportunism. Two excuses are commonly made for him: one that he was carried away by fanaticism; the other that any other Reformer of the time would have done the same. But Calvin was no fanatic; he was a merciless logician, and that is all. Nor is it true that others would have acted in like manner. Luther's opposition to the prosecution of those who dissented from him was plainly expressed, and it is difficult to ascribe to a Melanchthon, a Bucer, or an Oecolampadius, such action as that of Calvin. On the other hand judicial murder has been a favourite weapon of militant Calvinism. The execution of Aikenhead at Edinburgh in 1697 was no better and no worse than that of Servetus at Geneva in 1553.

And Calvin now reigned in Geneva. His power was strengthened by the immense respect with which he was by this time regarded throughout Europe, his influence penetrating even to far-off Poland, where, by the way, he recommended episcopacy. He had indeed made of his city a veritable Protestant Rome '-a tribunal to which every kind of religious difficulty was submitted. What was the fit punishment for adultery? May the Communion be