August 28.—Abandoning the moderate tone he had hitherto observed, and taking the petition of the prisoner for his text, Rigot now entered on the task prescribed him of showing that the early Christian Emperors, contrary to the allegation in the petition, did take cognisance of heresy, and by their Laws and Constitutions consigned all who denied the doctrine of the Trinity to death. ‘But the prisoner,’ said Rigot, ‘his own conscience condemning him and arguing him deserving of death, would have the magistrate deprived of the right to punish the heretic capitally. To escape such a fate it is that he has now put forward the false plea that for false doctrine the guilty are never to be summarily punished. Not to seem to favour the errors of the Anabaptists, moreover, ever rebellious against the authority of the magistrate, it is that the prisoner in his petition now pretends to repudiate their doctrines; yet can he not show a single passage in his writings in which he reprobates their principles and practices.’ All this was obviously most unfair to the prisoner. He was certainly opposed to infant baptism, and in so much agreed with the Anabaptists; but, far from declaring himself inimical to the constituted authorities of the state, he is emphatic in proclaiming the necessity of upholding them in the exercise of their lawful authority, and on the duty incumbent on subjects to obey.[87]
‘The further allegation of the prisoner,’ continued the public prosecutor, still harping on the petition, ‘that he never communicated his opinions to anyone, is manifestly false; for here we have had him saying that he should think he offended God did he not impart to others that which God had revealed to him. How shall we believe that, for the thirty years during which he has been engaged in elaborating and printing his horrible heresies, he has never communicated a word of them to anyone? Bethink ye, that he began at the age of twenty—an age when young people invariably communicate their views and opinions to one another, their friends and fellow-students—and by this judge of the kind of conscience the man puts into his answers with a view to abuse justice—as if he repented in any way of his horrible misdeeds! for though now saying that he is ready to submit to correction and ask pardon, he again and far oftener audaciously maintains that he has said nothing and done nothing amiss.’
Whether influenced by Calvin, to whose party in the State Rigot appears to have belonged, or involved in the suit, and believing it his duty to do all in his power to obtain the conviction of the prisoner, we see him now speaking as if he were intimately persuaded of Servetus’s culpability, and even looking on him as already condemned; hence the indignation with which he repels the petitioner’s request to have Counsel to assist him in his defence. This, indeed, was a demand that could by no means be granted without taking the case from the criminal category in which it had been placed by Calvin from the first. It is not so very long since the felon or the incriminated for felony among ourselves was denied the advantage of Counsel, and we are not to wonder at the same rule obtaining in the Republic of Geneva more than three hundred years ago.
Had Servetus succeeded in obtaining Counsel, he could not, by the laws of Geneva, have been dealt with capitally; and this would not have met the views of Calvin, it being impossible in his opinion adequately to punish the crime of which he held the man had been guilty by any infliction short of death. Rigot therefore became eloquent on the petitioner’s insolence, as he called it, in asking for Counsel to aid him in his defence. ‘Skilled in lying as he is,’ said M. Rigot, ‘there is no reason why he should now demand an advocate. Who is there indeed,’ he proceeds, ‘who would or who could consent to assist him in his impudent falsehoods and horrible propositions? It has not yet come to this that such seducers as he have been allowed to speak through Counsel; and then there is not a shadow of the simplicity that might seem to require assistance of the kind. Let him therefore be disabused of any hope he may have conceived that so impertinent a demand can for a moment be entertained, and ordered to reply by yea or nay to the further questions to be put to him.’ Rigot, we might fancy, must have thought that artful lying was a principal part of a counsel’s duties to his client.
Descending to further particulars suggested by the petition, the prisoner was asked, ‘On what grounds he rested the statement he makes concerning the judgment of heretics in the ancient church?’ To which he answered: ‘On the histories we have of Constantine the Great.’ ‘In the course of his law studies at Toulouse, however,’ said the prosecutor, ‘the prisoner must have made acquaintance with the code of Justinian, with the chapters in particular which treat of the Trinity, of the Catholic Faith, and of Heresy and Apostacy, in which he must know that opinions such as those he professes are condemned.’ The prisoner replied that ‘it was now twenty-four years since he had seen Justinian, and indeed he had never read him save in a cursory way, as young men at school or college are apt to do; and then,’ he went on to say, ‘Justinian did not live in the age of the primitive church, but in times when many things had become corrupted; when Bishops had begun to tyrannise and had already made the Church familiar with criminal prosecutions.’ To this most pertinent reply, no answer was attempted.
Reproached with having calumniated the Ministers of the Word of God as teachers of false doctrine—which on his part, said Monsieur Rigot, amounts to a capital crime—Servetus admitted that calumny of the kind deserved the severest punishment, but maintained nevertheless that in disputation it was common and not unpardonable for opponents to gainsay one another in strong language, without being held guilty of calumny or defamation, and so of deserving punishment by the civil authorities for what they say.
Referring next to his intercourse with Œcolampadius and Capito, to whom he had ascribed conformity with his views, although, said Rigot, he must know that they were both doctors well approved by the reformed churches, and consequently could not possibly be of his mind on the subjects in debate; he replied ‘that consonance in every particular was not universal either among the Reformers or the reformed churches; Luther and Melanchthon, for instance, had both of them written against Calvin on the subject of the sacraments and free will. Without being in a condition to prove what he says in his petition, he declares nevertheless that in conversation with Capito, when they were private and without other witness than God, he—Capito—did assent to his views. Œcolampadius, he owned, had withdrawn the approval he seemed to accord in the first instance.’
When we refer to Œcolampadius’s letters,[88] we have no difficulty in believing what Servetus here asserts to be the truth. It was only after Servetus had more thoroughly exposed his opinions in conversation, that the Reformer of Basle saw the unsoundness, which had not appeared in the confession of faith sent him at an earlier period by his correspondent. And here let us observe that, whilst Œcolampadius is now particularly cited, nothing is said of Capito, still a Minister in the Reformed Church. Capito, however, was, as it seems, not entirely to be relied on in his views of the Trinity, that stumbling-block in the way of the first Reformers, so many of whom we have found giving but a half-hearted assent to the verbal contradictions it involves: the Reformers could spare one another as it seems, on the subject, though they had no mercy for Servetus!
It being objected to the prisoner that he was in manifest contradiction with himself when he said he thought he should offend God did he not impart the doctrine that had been revealed to him; he replied that what he had stated was his opinion and the truth; not-withstanding which he had spoken of his views to none but the doctors of the Reformed Church particularly named; a course he had followed, indeed, in consonance with the commandment of our Lord, not to cast pearls before swine: ‘I would not proclaim myself to incompetent persons, and I was living among Papists in times when there was active persecution going on and much cruelty practised.’
The prosecutor now alleged, but as usual without a tittle of evidence, that the prisoner had had extensive epistolary relations with Italy, a country in which it was believed his doctrines had many followers—a fact, said Rigot, which it was unlikely he did not know, and less likely, still, not to improve upon, did he know it. To this Servetus replied by a simple denial: he had had no communications with Italy by letter or otherwise; adding that his only correspondents had been Œcolampadius, Calvin, Abel Poupin, and F. Viret, from whom alone the Court had any information concerning letters of his. Had we no other intimation of Calvin’s prompting, at this stage of the proceedings, than the reference now made to the spread of Antitrinitarian doctrines in Italy, we should feel assured that it was he who was fighting under the mask of Rigot, as he had formerly fought under that of Trie and of De la Fontaine. Rigot was not likely to know much of the spread of Antitrinitarian views in Italy, but Calvin was, as we learn distinctly through the letter of Paul Gaddi to him, which we have quoted. Calvin, indeed, makes pointed and angry reference to such a state of things both in his ‘Refutatio Errorum’ and ‘Déclaration pour maintenir la vraie Foy.’