Imperfectly, incompletely, therefore, as the great function of the circulation is conceived by Servetus, his account of so much of it as belongs to the pulmonary system is all his own and an immense advance on aught that had been imagined before. Had his ‘Restoration of Christianity’ been suffered to get abroad in the world and into the hands of anatomists, we can hardly imagine that the immortality which now attaches so truly and deservedly to the great name of Harvey would have been reserved for him. But save to a few theologians, who gave no heed to his physiological speculations, Servetus’s book remained unknown in the republic of letters, for more than a century after it had fallen from the press—no naturalist had seen it during all that time. So effectually had it been hunted out and made away with, that of the thousand copies printed, two only, as we have seen, are now known to survive. The ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ of Michael Servetus, consequently, never influenced either speculation or discovery in connection with the circulation of the blood. But reading the book as we are now suffered to do, let us not overlook in its author the Physiological Genius of his age. Who shall say what amount of influence the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ might have had upon both Science and Religion had it been suffered to see the light! For it is not the possession only, but the pursuit of truth that truly ennobles man; and in Servetus’s incomplete induction in the sphere of physics we see the path fairly entered on that has given to modern science all its triumphs. Nor pause we here: in the domain of letters and criticism, he is nowise less in advance of his age than in physiology. Who among biblical scholars before Servetus had seen the applicability of so much that is said in the Psalms and prophetical books of the Jewish Scriptures to men and events contemporaneous with, when they had not preceded, the times in which their authors lived? Servetus’s contemporaries among the Reformers without exception set out from the letter of the New Testament as the source of their faith, the warrant for the conclusions they built upon its text. But he declared that there was a Christian Doctrine before there was any New Testament; and we now know that this came not into existence until thirty, forty, sixty, and in parts as many as 150, years had passed after the great moral teacher of Nazareth had expiated his superiority to the shows and superstitions and errors of his day by the cruel death of the cross.
Had biblical criticism become a science a century sooner than it did, the world might now by possibility be nearer the goal of truth as regards the Religious Idea than it is, and grave doubts have sooner arisen as to the competency of the barbarous Jews to solve the mystery of the ‘Something not ourselves’ which we are led by our nature to conceive and think of as Cause, and to imagine as over and above this ‘bank and shoal of Time,’ whereon we pass our lives.
Quitting physiological discussion for his proper subject, our author approaches the practical part of his theory of Christianity. Faith is the first element, and is spoken of as an emotion rather than a cognition—a spontaneous movement of the heart, not an act of the understanding, its essence being belief in the man Jesus Christ as the Son of God (pp. 297-300). The end and object of the whole New Testament teaching, he says, is to lead men to a belief of this kind (p. 293), whereby they are reconciled and made acceptable to God, conceive a detestation for sin and become exemplars and exponents of the Christian virtues—Love, Hope, and Charity. ‘Faith of this kind,’ he continues, ‘makes us aware of our poverty, of our misery. For if we believe that the man Jesus is the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, we already admit that the world lies in sin and so needs saving.’
Unlike the other Reformers of the Church, Servetus, in this his latest work as in his first, makes much less of the Fall of Man and the wrath of God as consequences of Adam’s transgression. Original sin can hardly be said to have a place in his system. Sin, he even says, was not brought forth on earth, but arose in heaven, through a revolt of the angels under Satan, who, utterly opposed to God in all things, seduced man from his allegiance and so obtained the empire which it was the purpose of Christ’s coming to regain. Instead of holding the heart of man as utterly evil and corrupt, he says, ‘that good works are proper and spontaneous to the individual. By the death of a sinless being on whom, as sinless, Satan had no hold, he was thrown out of the law, forfeited the rights he had acquired, through the disobedience of man, and God recovered the empire he had lost.’ Satan, therefore, performs a highly important part in the Christology of Servetus; but it differs notably from that both of the Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches, in this: that Christ does not suffer death to satisfy divine justice and reconcile God to mankind, but to traverse the Devil in the rights he had acquired by guile. But all such speculations belong to a former age of the world. They are the fossils of the speculative stratum in the nature of man, and only of interest now to reasonable people as records of the chimæras and incongruities that are engendered by imagination dissevered from science, when the understanding, instead of leading, is led, and the unknowable is assumed as foundation adequate to support conclusions affecting the lives of men in this world and their fate in Eternity.
Servetus then makes little or nothing of the ‘Corruption of human nature’ as consequence of Adam’s transgression, so much insisted on by the Reformed Clergy, and he entirely rejects their assumption of man’s incompetence of himself to do anything good. Satan, however, is still seen as the opponent of God in the Restored as in the Reformed system. ‘The Devil intruded himself into all flesh,’ says our ‘Restorer.’ ‘Satan is Sin dwelling within us, and to us is disease and death (p. 385); these being the consequences of Adam’s transgression (p. 358).’ So much our author felt himself bound to accept in a literal sense, for so he finds it written; but he proceeds forthwith to interpret the text in his own way, and declares that Adam’s transgression brought no real guiltiness on mankind; for such can never be incurred through another’s, but only through each man’s own deed, a previous knowledge of what is good and evil being the indispensable condition to responsibility. But as a knowledge of good and evil is only attained when men arrive at years of discretion, so did Servetus think that mortal sin was not committed, nor even guilt incurred, before the twentieth year (pp. 363 and 387). Though made subject to corporal death and scheol by Adam’s fault, men do not for this die spiritually; they will be restored at the last day when Christ comes to judge the world: ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinth. xv.), say the Scriptures [of the apostle Paul]; and these words, according to our author, mean that men will not be condemned to the second or spiritual death because of Adam’s disobedience, but only when, knowing good and evil, they have done much amiss of themselves. Servetus, therefore, speaks of that as a punishment for sin to which teeming nations of the East look forward as reward for the ills of life—Nirwana, a state of unconscious, everlasting rest! Servetus himself has no special place,—no hell either of temporary or eternal torture for wrong-doing.
We do not remember to have met with the word atonement in Servetus’s writings. He had evidently passed beyond the idea of the vengeful Hebrew God and the shedding of blood as a propitiatory means believed in by the Christians of his day, and still so commonly accepted in our own; Servetus’s religion was as comprehensive as that of his great Master. ‘Turks,’ says he, ‘pray aright when they address themselves to God, though they neither know nor believe that God ever promised anything to the patriarchs.’
Justification is the dogma that is next entered on, and is said to be by grace: ‘We are justified,’ says Servetus, following Paul, ‘when we believe in Christ as the Son of God,’—in the way he apprehended the sonship, being of course to be understood. But, escaping from leading strings, we find him elsewhere declaring, and still in advance of his day, that all who of their own natural motion lead good lives, be they Jews or Pagans, are justified before God, and that the good life suffices to have men resuscitated in glory. ‘God,’ says he, ‘does not repute us just of his own good grace only, but also by the merits of our works; in other words, of our lives.’
In the book on the perdition of the world and its restoration by Christ, which follows, our author has much on the subject of baptism—the means or preliminary, in his eyes, to Regeneration. He will not, however, allow that unbaptized infants can possibly be looked on as lost souls. ‘The little children whom Christ blessed,’ says he, ‘were not baptized. How should the most clement and merciful Lord condemn those who had never sinned? Did he ever say to the little ones unbaptized: Go ye accursed into everlasting fire? How should he curse those he blessed? They seem to me to attempt to befool me who say that the salvation of an unconscious infant depends on my will to baptize or to leave it unbaptized.’ Opposed to the baptism of infants as a meaningless and inefficient ceremony, Servetus was all the more emphatic in his insistence on the indispensableness of the rite performed later in life. ‘Jesus was circumcised indeed as an infant,’ says he, ‘but only baptized when he was thirty years of age. We ought not, therefore, to approach the Laver of Regeneration before this age if we would imitate Christ.’ ‘Pædobaptism,’ says he, ‘is a detestable abomination, an extinction of the Holy Spirit in the soul of man, a dissolution of the Church of Christ, a confusion of the whole Christian faith, an innovation whereby Christ is set aside and his kingdom trodden under foot. Woe to you, ye baptizers of infancy, for ye close the kingdom of heaven against mankind—the kingdom of heaven into which ye neither enter yourselves, nor suffer others to enter—woe! woe!’ He who is baptized in his infancy, consequently, who believes that he is properly baptized and so neglects the regenerative rite in years of discretion, according to Servetus, loses his chance of instant entrance into Christ’s kingdom on his death. In his comprehensive charity, however, we fancy Servetus must have a salvo for such neglect, though we have missed it. If he has failed to set it forth in words, we feel assured that it was nevertheless alive in his heart.