The circumstances connected with the printing of the ‘Restoration of Christianity’ at Vienne were once more brought up, the prisoner being particularly questioned as to his relations with the publisher Arnoullet and his manager Geroult. In contradiction to what he had already admitted on this head, and with the letter of Arnoullet to Bertet lying open before the Court, he now averred that he had not had any, even indirect, communication with Geroult on the subject of his book! This, we regret to think, must necessarily be untrue. The difficulty he had had to find a publisher, as we see by the letter of his friend Marrinus; the premium he had paid Arnoullet to have the work undertaken, the secrecy with which the printing had been carried on, added to other minor terms of the contract—that all was to be at his proper cost, that he was to be his own corrector of the press, &c.—-everything, in a word, assures us that both Arnoullet and Geroult were as well aware of what they were about as the author himself. Arnoullet, we may be certain, never intended to appear as either the printer or publisher of the heretical work. It was to come out in Italy, in Switzerland, in Germany—anywhere, everywhere, save at Vienne, Lyons, or Paris, the principal emporia of the book trade of France. Neither, indeed, did Michel Villeneuve, the Physician, intend to show himself at once as its author. The M.S.V., on the last page, was a private mark by which the child might be known and claimed by the parent at some future time, when his fame had spread over Europe, when he had been eagerly enquired after by an admiring world, and raised above the heads of Luther, Melanchthon, Œcolampadius and Calvin, as the great ‘Restorer of Christianity’!
The persistence with which Servetus stuck to the untruth now uttered is not difficult of explanation: his first admission of complicity on the part of the Viennese publisher and his manager was made inadvertently and without forethought; his retractation and denial came of reflection and better feeling, when he saw that the admission was calculated to bring the two men who had aided him in his undertaking into the same trouble as himself. In spite of what M. Rigot says, Michael Servetus never meets us save as a man of a perfectly guileless nature—more guileless perhaps than truthful.
As every point in the several indictments was made subject of renewed inquiry, so do we now find further questions addressed to the prisoner on his life and social habits; for the prosecution, as we have seen, held it matter of moment to present him, if possible, as a person of immoral and ill-regulated life. They had not now, however, any more than formerly, a particle of evidence to show that he had ever lived otherwise than soberly, chastely, and respectably; and as to the allegation, brought up against him for the second time, that he had said women were not such paragons of virtue as to make matrimony necessary to secure their more intimate converse, he declared, as he had done already, that he had no recollection of ever having said anything of the kind; but if he had, it was by way of bravado, and to conceal a certain infirmity under which he laboured which indisposed or incapacitated him, as he believed, from entering on matrimony.[89]
Making an abrupt change of front, the prosecutor now inquired of the prisoner what he meant by the passage in his book where he says that, ‘The Truth begins to declare itself and will be accomplished for all ere long.’ ‘Do you mean that your doctrine is the Truth, and will shortly be universally received?’ ‘I mean to speak of the progress of the Reformation,’ said Servetus; ‘the truth began to be declared in the time of Luther, and has gone on spreading since then until now.’ Had he stopped here, all would have been well and the answer must have been scored to his credit; but he went on to particularise and to say that ‘the Reformation would have to advance upon some matters which in his opinion were not yet well set forth.’
This was immediately seized upon as a challenge by the men who believed that the Reformation had already been accomplished or completed through them; so that he was forthwith required to explain what he meant by such language. Here, however, he dared not be outspoken; and though he made no denial of his doctrine, which was seen of all to be in his estimation the complement and crown of the Reformation, he diverged into a variety of topics, floundered, and wound up by proposing to enlighten the Court by a reference to the Bible and the Fathers, or to explain himself more fully than he had done in his book if they would grant him a conference, in their presence, with one or more men of learning. Pressed further, he said that he could not divine whether his doctrine would ever be generally accepted or not; but he believed and should continue to believe that it was founded in truth until shown to be otherwise. ‘Such things,’ said he in conclusion, ‘are commonly enough denounced and condemned as erroneous at first, but are by and by acknowledged for truth and universally accepted.’
The prisoner had much the same difficulty in justifying his singular opinion that persons under the age of twenty were not accountable agents, or incapable of sin, and so not obnoxious to punishment for their misdeeds. He, in fact, made but an indifferent escape from such a paradox by declaring that, in speaking as he did, he had capital punishment only in view; not that he thought there should be penalties of no kind for evil-doers under age. They, he said, might be properly punished by flogging, seclusion, and the like. From what he says on another occasion we see that this fancy of Servetus was founded on a literal and arbitrary interpretation of the text where Jehovah, to punish the Israelites, determines that no one over twenty years of age is to enter the Land of Promise; all others are to leave their carcasses in the wilderness.
Having said a few words in his book implying no disapproval of the infidel Alkoran, the prisoner, in reply to the reproaches made him for having spoken without reprobation of such a personage as Mahomet and his book, now averred that he had only adduced Mahomet and the Koran to the greater glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, and even ventured to add: ‘That though the book generally is bad, it nevertheless contains good things, which it is lawful to use’—language that was looked on as little short of blasphemy by his auditors, but that to us proclaims the superiority of the speaker over the bigots around him.
The last question in this day’s proceedings referred to a sojourn he was said to have made in Italy immediately before coming to Geneva, and how he had passed his time since he arrived there. And here again we find Calvin the prompter; for it is he who speaks of Servetus having wandered for four months in Italy before reaching Geneva. Any such journey or sojourn, however, as that now hinted at, Servetus positively denied; ‘and for such information as the Court might require of his doings since he had entered their city, he referred them to his host of the Rose, where he had had his quarters before being thrown into their prison.’ It is not difficult to see the drift of the latter clause of the question; but Servetus was on his guard now, and did not commit himself or his prompters, the Libertines, as he had done when the printer of his book was in question.
August 31.—After the lapse of three days an answer was received to the letter addressed by the Syndics and Council of Geneva to the authorities of Vienne. In this missive the Genevese were informed that it was impossible to comply with the request they had made to have the documents connected with the trial of Michel Villeneuve sent to them, inasmuch as the authorities of Vienne could not sanction any review or possible inculpation of their proceedings. They therefore only forwarded duplicates of the warrant of arrest and sentence of death passed upon the said Villeneuve, and for themselves they demanded ‘the delivery of that individual into their hands, in order that the sentence passed upon him might be carried into effect,’ engaging, as they went on to say, ‘that it should be of a sort that would make any search for further charges against him unnecessary.’[90]