In the book on the Power of Satan and Antichrist, Servetus attacks the Papacy in terms of measureless reprobation, likening the Pope to the Antichrist of the Apocalypse, calling him the son of perdition, and speaking of his dominion as the reign of God’s opposite on earth (p. 393). In exalting himself above his fellow-men and requiring them to look on him as a god, the Pope has usurped the forbidden kingdom. The imposition of a spiritual papacy, he maintains, has brought more mischief on the spiritual world than the carnal Adam brought on the world of flesh. For his sin was Adam condemned to the pain of corporeal death, and for theirs are the beast and his ministers (the pope and his council) doomed in the Apocalypse to the pains of everlasting fire (p. 394).
Against monastic vows of all kinds, Servetus is here most vehemently outspoken. According to him, they are mere sacrileges of tradition. He does not object to the celibate life, however, which he says he has chosen for himself; but Peter, he thinks, would be amazed did he see the shaven, cowled, and bedizened priests engaged in their mimic play, whereby they lead the people to the most open idolatry. But it is the mendicant monk that he has in more especial abhorrence. Him he compares to the locust, which, eating up everything it encounters, leaves desolation behind. ‘The locust,’ he says, ‘has by nature a sort of monk’s cowl; add to this a wallet, and you have a begging friar complete; in other words, a hooded devil.’
In the book on the Lord’s Supper, our author speaks of course of the papistical transubstantiation, the annihilation of the bread as bread and its transmutation into mere whiteness. ‘I rather wonder,’ says he, ‘whether Satan was the circumcisor of common sense from the brains of those who of bread make not-bread, and in its stead produce a vendible whiteness; for these puny sacrificators, for a mouthful of whiteness given without wine, make us count out our money (p. 510). To such degradation of mind are these men brought that they call that the true body of Christ, which, in the whiteness they imagine, rats and dogs might devour. Never was there any such blindness as this among the Jews—blindness the more notable as the Papists say they are infallible (p. 511). But as circumcision of the foreskin makes the Jew, and circumcision of the heart the Christian, so does circumcision of the scalp make the sham Jew, the papal sacrificial priest and slave of Antichrist.’
He is scarcely more complimentary when he speaks of the views of the Reformers on the subject of the Supper, styling the Lutherans Impanators, and the Calvinists Tropists, the Roman Catholics being of course Transubstantiators. If we understand him aright, he looks on the Supper as something more than a simple commemorative feast, to be first partaken of immediately after adult baptism, to which it is the necessary complement; but we are startled after what, as we interpret it, he has just said in this sense, when we by and by find him speaking as if he believed that the body and blood of Christ were really partaken of in the Christian Communion (p. 281 and Letter xxx. to Calvin). The contradictory statements met with in the writings of Servetus, however, as we have had occasion oftener than once already to say, can only be harmonised by taking note of his pantheistic views. In the instance before us, for example, on the pantheistic principle, as God is in and of the substance of all things, so was He in Christ, or Christ, in so far, was God. In consonance with the letter, therefore the bread and wine of the solemn rite are flesh and blood. The language of mysticism, however, is often little intelligible to the naturalist, who in his incapacity here may be likened to those who, with ears otherwise acute, cannot distinguish certain extremely acute or grave sounds, or who, with eyes otherwise excellent, see no difference between such opposite colours as red and green. Like the Reformers of all denominations, Servetus maintained the Cup to be an indispensable element in the celebration of the Supper. In the Papal Mass, he says, there is no true Communion. The bread is not broken in common, and the wine is appropriated by the Sacrificator, even as the Babylonian Priests of old appropriated the oblations of the altar: ‘Quorban,’ says the Popish Priest as he drinks, to the lookers on, ‘it will do you good, too.’ (p. 522).
Singularly enough, when we think of what he has to say in disparagement of the Roman Catholic priesthood, we find him recognising in ministers a power to absolve men from their sins and reconcile them to God—potestas ministris est remittendi peccata et reconciliandi homines Deo (p. 516). This, we can only conclude, is said because of what he found in the Sacred Text;[61] no word of which, as we know, would he gainsay. But that Michael Servetus, mystic though he was, believed in his soul that one man can absolve another of his sin, we do not think possible. He did not surmise that the fourth gospel was only written a hundred and fifty years after the death of Jesus, and by a Neo-platonic philosopher, presumably of Alexandria, fashioner, like Paul of Tarsus, of a Christology and Christianity of his own.
In illustration of the character of the man, the study of whose life engages us, the prayer with which he concludes the book on the ‘Restoration of Christianity’—for here the work does end in fact, all that follows being but by way of appendix—ought not to be overlooked. It is in immediate sequence to a renewed phillipic against the baptizers of infants, and to the following effect:—
‘Almighty Father! Father of all mercy, free us miserable men from this darkness of death, for the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ Our Lord. O Jesus Christ, thou Son of God, who died for us, help us, lest we perish! We, thy suppliants, pray to thee as thou hast taught us, saying, Hallowed be thy Name; thy kingdom come; and do thou, Lord, come! thy bride the Church, praying in the Apocalypse, says, Come! The spirits of thy children, praying here, say, Come! Let all who hear this pray and cry aloud, and with John exclaim, Come! Thou Who hast said, I come quickly (Apocalypse xxii.) wilt surely come, and with thy coming put an end to Antichrist. So be it. Amen!’
The first of the additions to the system of ‘Restored Christianity’ are the thirty letters to Calvin, which we have already analysed, in what seemed the appropriate place.
The book or chapter on the ‘Sixty signs of the reign of Antichrist, and of his presence among us,’ which follows, need not detain us. The signs are for the most part arbitrarily assumed by the writer, on the ground that his own views are the truth, those of the Papists and Reformers mistaken, false, or short of the truth. Having shown to his own satisfaction that every evil-doer, in the shape of an exalted personage who has ever appeared in the world, even from Satan, Nimrod, and Nebuchadnezzar, prefigured the Pope, and that the Pope is Antichrist, he then very logically concludes that all the dogmas and doctrines sanctioned by the Papacy are of the Devil. Under this category he places the doctrine of the Trinity in the foremost rank, then the Baptism of Infants, the Mass, Transubstantiation, all but everything, in short, characteristic of Roman Catholic Christianity. As in so many other places, he is here also ready with a prayer, which we quote as ever-recurring testimony to the sincerely, but misunderstood, pious nature of the man:—