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[ I am more deeply scandalized at the single execution of Servetus, than at the hecatombs which have blazed in the Auto de Fes of Spain and Portugal. 1. The zeal of Calvin seems to have been envenomed by personal malice, and perhaps envy. He accused his adversary before their common enemies, the judges of Vienna, and betrayed, for his destruction, the sacred trust of a private correspondence. 2. The deed of cruelty was not varnished by the pretence of danger to the church or state. In his passage through Geneva, Servetus was a harmless stranger, who neither preached, nor printed, nor made proselytes. 3. A Catholic inquisition yields the same obedience which he requires, but Calvin violated the golden rule of doing as he would be done by; a rule which I read in a moral treatise of Isocrates (in Nicocle, tom. i. p. 93, edit. Battie) four hundred years before the publication of the Gospel. * Note: Gibbon has not accurately rendered the sense of this passage, which does not contain the maxim of charity Do unto others as you would they should do unto you, but simply the maxim of justice, Do not to others the which would offend you if they should do it to you.—G.]
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[ See Burnet, vol. ii. p. 84-86. The sense and humanity of the young king were oppressed by the authority of the primate.]
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[ Erasmus may be considered as the father of rational theology. After a slumber of a hundred years, it was revived by the Arminians of Holland, Grotius, Limborch, and Le Clerc; in England by Chillingworth, the latitudinarians of Cambridge, (Burnet, Hist. of Own Times, vol. i. p. 261-268, octavo edition.) Tillotson, Clarke, Hoadley, &c.]
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[ I am sorry to observe, that the three writers of the last age, by whom the rights of toleration have been so nobly defended, Bayle, Leibnitz, and Locke, are all laymen and philosophers.]
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[ See the excellent chapter of Sir William Temple on the Religion of the United Provinces. I am not satisfied with Grotius, (de Rebus Belgicis, Annal. l. i. p. 13, 14, edit. in 12mo.,) who approves the Imperial laws of persecution, and only condemns the bloody tribunal of the inquisition.]