On the subject of Faith, to which Calvin’s system gave much less free play than Luther’s, we find Servetus siding with him of the North rather than him of the South. Neither of them, however, as we have seen, had any conception of faith in the way Servetus understood it. Faith, says he, consists in a certain compliant state of mind, proclaimed by unquestioning assent. This, the true saving faith, is of the kind avowed by Peter when he declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yet faith even of this kind, distinctly as it has the lead in Servetus’s Christology, is not yet all in all: to become efficient or saving, it must be conjoined with Charity. ‘If faith be not clothed with charity,’ says he, ‘it dies in nakedness; and as habit is strengthened by action, the body by exercise, and the understanding by study, so is faith strengthened by good works.’ The subject-will and fatalism, asserted by Calvin in his doctrine of predestination and election, have therefore no real foundation in Scripture; nay more, there is unreason in the assumption of such a principle, and in the admonition given to mankind to do that which it must be known beforehand they cannot do. ‘You speak,’ says our writer, ‘of free acts, yet really say that there is no such thing as free action. But who so devoid of understanding as to prescribe free choice to one incapable of choosing freely! It is mere fatuity besides to derive subject-will from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us; but in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will, choose, determine, and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all things proceed essentially from him. The Spirit of God is innate in man, and as the power to do is one thing, so is the necessity to do another. Although God elects us as the potter does his clay, it by no means follows that we are nothing more than clay. Paul’s simile deceives you; it is not universally applicable.’
The Law of Moses, Calvin has said, is still in force and to be observed by us as truly as it was by the Jews; violating it, he says, we violate the Law of God. Servetus’s reply to this is the burden of the Twenty-third and three following Letters. ‘I fancy I hear some Jew or Mussulman speaking here,’ says our respondent. ‘But to what is violence done—is it to a stone, or to certain letters cut in a stone? Christ, I say, accomplished the Law and then it was abrogated; in him we have the New Covenant, the Old superseded; in him are we made free. The law of Moses was unbearable; it slew the soul, it increased sin, it begat anger; virtue itself through it became at times transgression, and in compassion for our frailty it was annulled. You make God exercise a rude and miserable people in a mill-round. What would you say were some tyrant to require mountains of gold or the stars of heaven from your Genevese, and threaten them with death for non-compliance with his demands? But the Old Law bound men to impossibilities. Art thou not then ashamed of slavery and tyrannical violence? Insisting on the observance of this law, you yet go on dreaming with your Luther, and saying that no one ever entirely fulfilled the commandment which says “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and soul.” David and others, then, who said that they sought God with all their heart and strove with all their might to keep his commandments, are but liars to you. And what, after all, are the laws of Moses? If conformable to Nature then are they the laws of God, the author of Nature, older than Moses, and to be observed of Christians independently of Moses. But God never required obedience of the kind you imagined; he but asks of each according to his strength. Cease then, O Calvin, to torture us with the law of Moses, and to insist on its observance. It looks as if you had a mind to be pitied of God in your impotency—of God who may be said so often to have had to take pity on the Jews when they were under the law.’ Who shall say that Michael Servetus was not in advance of John Calvin?
The twenty-seventh, eighth, and ninth epistles are only significant as expositions of doctrinal views in their bearing on social life. Is it lawful, he asks, for a Christian to assume the magistracy? to administer the laws of the land and to take the lives of evil-doers? Of course it is. The order of the world is maintained by law and justice. But then to take life? Where there is hope of amendment, as in the case of the woman taken in adultery, we see the penalty of death remitted: Go, said Jesus to her, and sin no more. But even where there is malice and unyielding obstinacy, recourse is to be had to chastisement of other kinds than taking life. Among these, banishment, approved by Christ, and excommunication, practised by the Church, are to be commended. Schism and heresy were punished in this way whilst traces of apostolic tradition remained. Criminals, in matters not pertaining to the faith, are variously punished by the laws of every country; and this is in conformity with natural law. They bear the sword aright and lawfully who bear it in the cause of justice and to the repression of crime; and it is not against gospel precepts that we serve as soldiers in defence of our lives and possessions.
Servetus, we find, accords rather extensive powers to Bishops, whom, in opposition to Calvin, he recognises, and to Ministers of the Church generally. Bishops, like good shepherds, are to know their flocks, and to take care that no infection gets in among them; ministers again—he does not use the word priests—are privileged to reconcile sinners to God, and to punish unbelievers by excommunicating them and delivering them over to Satan and spiritual death. Their authority, however, is only to be exercised under the guidance of the Spirit—what spirit he does not say. Confession, too, he approves of, but the minister is not to be consulted save in case of some grave doubt or difficulty arising.
Our writer is greatly displeased with Calvin’s interpretation of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in which like wages are given to those hired at every hour of the day; from which the Reformer infers that there is no difference or distinction in glory, in faith, or in works. ‘To you truly,’ says Servetus, ‘there needs no distinction as to less or more; for with you these are all alike of non-avail, some as you maintain being saved with, as some are saved without, merit of their own. But it is faith that of the impious makes the pious, of the dead the living. Ignorant of all gospel truth is he who does not attach supreme significance to faith in Christ as the Son of God.’
The concluding epistle of the series must have given great offence to Calvin, the writer reproaching him with setting the Christian on no higher level than the vulgar Jew. ‘They are alike to you, indeed, alike carnal, because to you are the benefits of Christ’s coming unknown; to you who in the Supper partake of nothing more than a trope or figure, and who treat baptism as the equivalent of a Levitical rite, the sign of a thing that is not. But in the Supper we, nourished by immortal food, for a terrestrial have a new celestial life imparted to us, and how should he perish who has once partaken of Christ? May God give you to receive all these things with a true understanding, led by the spirit of truth, by Jesus Christ and the Father. Amen.’ Scouting the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, as he did, we here find Servetus speaking as if he believed that it was the body of Christ indeed that was partaken of in the Supper! To understand this in him his pantheistic notions must again be taken into account. But pantheism, when not detached from the idea of personality, in the usual acceptation of the word, leads inevitably to such absurdity. Speaking as he does now, Servetus forgets his philosophy and yields himself up to his mysticism. With as much justice might he have said that Cannibals partake of God when they eat one another, as that the Christian communicant partakes of Christ when he joins the simple, solemn, commemorative feast.
CHAPTER XVII.
‘CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO’—THE RESTORATION OF CHRISTIANITY—DISCOVERY OF THE PULMONARY CIRCULATION.
We have seen that Servetus could never recover his MS. of the Restoration of Christianity from the hands of Calvin. But he had not sent his work for the review of the Reformer without retaining a copy for himself, and this he determined now to have printed and sent abroad into the world. With this view he forwarded the Manuscript to a publisher of Basle, Marrinus by name, with whom—if we may infer so much from the address of the publisher’s letter to him declining the work—he must have been on terms of intimacy. Marrinus’s letter is short, to the point, and in the following terms:—
‘Gratia et pax a Deo, Michael carissime!—the grace and peace of God be with you, dearest Michael! I have received your letter and your book; but I fancy that on reflection you will see why it cannot be published at Basle at this present time. When I have perused it [more carefully] I shall therefore return it to you by the accredited messenger you may send for it. But I beg you not to question my friendly feelings towards you. To what you say besides I shall reply at greater length and more particularly on another occasion. Farewell! Thy