Henry, to his honour, goes yet farther; he does not approve of Calvin’s attempt to detract from the horror and pity we feel for Servetus’ fate, by charging him with cowardice in the face of death. ‘Let us observe in Servetus,’ says the biographer of Calvin, ‘those beautiful traces of the true life which he showed at the last: his regret for former tergiversations, his humility, his constancy, his earnest prayer to God, and his forgiveness of his enemies. Had he but had the truth in his heart he would have died a true martyr; but he must tremble in his death hour, for he had blasphemed the Majesty of God.’ But Servetus did not tremble in his death hour, he never blasphemed the Majesty of God, and he died in charity with all men, even with him who had brought him to his untimely end, and who ten years after the death of his victim had no better title for him than Chien et meschant Garnement,—dog and wicked scoundrel!

Mosheim, to whom we owe the gathering and preservation of much that is interesting in connection with Servetus, working in the middle of the bygone century, and referring to what Calvin himself avows, viz., ‘that he would not have persevered so resolutely on the capital charge had Servetus been but modest and not rushed madly on his fate,’ exclaims, ‘What an avowal! Servetus, after all, must burn not because he had outraged the word of God, and infected the world with error, but because he had addressed John Calvin in disrespectful language! Calvin’s avowal is truly a hard knot for those to untie who hold that revenge had nothing to do with the death of Servetus. For my own part I am not bound to weigh all the grounds that tell for or against the Reformer, and I am not, perhaps, altogether impartial. I am minded, however, that they are not wholly in the right who say that Calvin proceeded against the unhappy Spaniard led on by hatred and revenge alone; and I am not so certain that they are in the wrong who think it was not mere religious zeal which suggested and carried the tragedy to its conclusion. What is man! The very best often serve God and themselves when they fancy they are serving God alone.’

With these words of the pious historian of the Church we conclude; tempering the severer criticism suggested by the facts as they present themselves, with the more charitable construction of the ecclesiastic.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX.

An account of the extant copies of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio;’ of the reprints of the work by Dr. de Murr and Dr. Mead, and of the notices the work has received in earlier and later times.

The ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ of Michael Servetus is one of the rarest books in the world. Of the thousand copies known to have been printed, two only are now known to survive; one of these being among the treasures of the National Library of Paris, the other among those of the Imperial and Royal Library of Vienna. The history of both of these copies, curiously enough, is complete from rather a remote date, and it is somewhat provoking to know that both of them were once in this country; but bigotry sent the one, and want of religious sympathy, presumably, suffered the other to leave our shores. The Paris copy certainly belonged to Dr. Richard Mead, the distinguished physician and medallist, who lived in the reign of Queen Anne, and is believed, before it came into Mead’s possession, to have formed part of the Library of the Landgrave of Kur-Hesse. How it got dissevered from this is not known. It was probably stolen and brought to England as to a sure market. Mead, liberal in politics and presumably in religion also, appears to have felt so much interest in Servetus’ work, not only by reason of the physiological matter it contained, but because of the free spirit of inquiry it breathed, that he was minded to have it reprinted and made generally accessible. He had accordingly got half-way with a new and handsome edition of the work in 4to. form, so far back as the year 1723, when his purpose reached the ears of Gibson, the then Bishop of London. Alarmed at the idea of light being let in on the world that had not been strained through the haze of Episcopalian orthodoxy, Gibson addressed himself immediately to the Censor of the Press for an injunction; and at his instance and order the impression, so far as it had gone, was seized, adjudged heretical, and publicly burned. A few copies of the reprint, however, must have escaped the conflagration, of which one is now in the Library of the London Medical Society. This I have had an opportunity of examining, and find that there wanted but little to have completed the most essential part of the work, the last page printed being the first of the chapter entitled ‘De Justitia Regni Christi.’

Disgusted, we may imagine, with the bigotry of Bishop Gibson and his abettors, and, it may be also, to secure his copy of the original against the chance of seizure, confiscation, and the fire, Doctor Mead exchanged it with M. de Boze, Member of the French Academy of the Fine Arts, for a series of medals, of which the Doctor was a known collector. The library of M. de Boze being purchased after his death by M. Boutin, late Intendant of Finance, and the President de Cotte, in common, the Servetus fell to the share of De Cotte, who sold it by-and-by at an exorbitant price, as said, to M. Gaignat, who parted with it in turn for a still larger sum—as much as 3,810 livres—to the Duc de la Vaillière, the greatest book collector of the age. On the death of De la Vaillière, and the dispersion of his magnificent library under the hammer, in 1784, the ‘Rest. Christianismi,’ believed at the time to be the only copy in existence, was secured for the sum of 4,120 livres tournois for the Bibliothèque du Roi, and it now remains one of the treasures of the great National Library of France. Much of the above information we gather from the letter of M. l’Abbé Rive, Librarian to the Duc de la Vaillière, which is appended to the London edition of Dutens’ ‘Recherches sur l’origine des Découvertes attribuées aux Modernes,’ of the year 1766.

But this is not all, nor even the most interesting of all we know about the Paris copy of the rare and remarkable book. It has the name of ‘Germain Colladon’ on the title-page, and the various passages on which Servetus was finally arraigned and condemned are underscored. It can, therefore, be no other than the copy which belonged to Colladon, the barrister, who prosecuted Servetus at Geneva, and must have been given him along with his brief by the attorney in the case. But the attorney in the case of Servetus was John Calvin; and we need not, therefore, doubt that the underlining is by ‘l’impitoyable Calvin’—the ruthless Calvin, as M. Flourens, who gives so much of the foregoing information as we have not supplemented, characterises the Genevese Reformer. The book shows what M. Flourens supposed to be scorching in one part; and this he gratuitously accounts for, by supposing that it is the copy which was to have been burned along with its author, but was saved in some unaccountable way. That copy, we may be well assured, was reduced to ashes and scattered to the winds with those of its hapless writer; and the presumed scorching, on the careful examination it received from the Rev. Henry Tollin, turns out to be the effect of damp. See Flourens’ ‘Histoire de la Découverte de la Circulation du Sang’ (Paris, 1854), 2nd Ed. Ib. 1857, p. 154.

The Vienna exemplar of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ again, when we first meet with a notice of it, belonged to Markos Szent Ivanayi, a Transylvanian gentleman, resident in London in the year 1665. Szent Ivanayi must, we presume, have held Unitarian principles, and on his return to his native country (in some districts of which Unitarianism is the established or prevailing form of religion), he presented his copy of the ‘Restitutio’ to the Congregation of Claudiopolis, with which he was in communion; and they, at a later date, by the hands of their superior, Stephen Agh, gave it, as the most valuable thing they possessed, to Samuel, Count Teleki de Izek, in acknowledgment of some act of favour from the magnate. The Count, on his part, informed of the rarity of the book, and rightly deeming that it was a gift such as a subject might offer to his sovereign, presented it to the Emperor Joseph the Second of Austria, by whom it was graciously accepted and forthwith enshrined in the great Library of Vienna. This copy of the ‘Restitutio’ is in better condition than that of Paris—‘præstat nitiore,’ says Dr. de Murr, from whom we have the foregoing information (De Murr, Chr. Th., M.D., ‘Adnotationes ad Bibliothecas Hallerianas, cum variis ad Scripta Michaelis Serveti pertinentibus.’ 4to. Erlangen. 1805).