Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
showed such abject servility. He saw in addition ‘the most powerful prince of his age, at the head of twenty thousand veteran soldiers, kneeling and kissing the feet of the Pope;’8 an exhibition which appears to have been thought of as simply degrading instead of edifying by the independent-minded secretary.
So great an event as the coronation of the Emperor was too favourable an occasion to be neglected for a stroke of business by the financiers of the Romish Church: indulgences were in the market in plenty, and at prices to suit all purchasers, immunity from the pains of purgatory being to be obtained for terms in the ratio of the money paid. How shall we imagine that so glaring an abuse could fail to touch Servetus, in the state of mind to which he must already have attained, in the same way as the proceedings of Tetzel and his coadjutors touched the common sense and conscience of Luther? It was doubtless with all he now observed before him that we, short while after, find him speaking in such virulent terms of the Papacy and exclaiming: ‘O bestia bestiarum, meretrix sceleratissima’—‘O beast most beastly, most wicked of harlots!’9 Some of Luther’s epithets, we might conclude, had found their way into the vocabulary of Servetus; and it may be that the violence of Luther’s invective, unchallenged by the rest of the Reformers, led him to fancy that he too might indulge without impropriety in language of an unseemly kind.
When we think of the times in which Servetus lived, his early education and subsequent surroundings, the violent hatred he seems already to have conceived against the Papacy is not a little extraordinary. We might be tempted to conclude that the free thought of Europe, of which the Reformation was the outcome and expression, had found even a more genial soil in the mind of this Spanish youth than in that of Luther himself, or any of his accredited followers. They went little way in freeing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth from the accretions which metaphysical subtlety, superstition, and ignorance of the laws of nature and the principles of things had gathered around it in the course of ages. Their business, as they apprehended it, was to reform the Church rather than the religion of which it was presumed to be the exponent; the task that Servetus set himself in the end was to reform religion, with little thought of a Church in any sense in which an institution of the kind was conceived in his day, whether by Papist or Protestant.
From reading the Bible at Toulouse and contrasting the humble life and simple theistic morality of the Prophet of Nazareth with the metaphysical subtleties and dogmatic deductions of the schoolmen, the pomp, the power, the tyranny and the greed of the priests so conspicuously displayed at Bologna, we can readily imagine the impression made on the independent spirit of Servetus—an impression that found more seemly utterance anon than that we have already quoted, and in words like these: ‘For my own part I neither agree nor disagree in every particular with either Catholic or Reformer. Both of them seem to me to have something of truth and something of error in their views; and whilst each sees the other’s shortcomings, neither sees his own. God in his goodness give us all to understand our errors and incline us to put them away. It would be easy enough, indeed, to judge dispassionately of everything, were we but suffered without molestation by the Churches freely to speak our minds; the older exponents of doctrine, in obedience to the recommendation of St. Paul, giving place to younger men, and these in their turn making way for teachers of the day who had aught to impart that had been revealed to them. But our doctors now contend for nothing but power. The Lord confound all tyrants of the Church! Amen.’—The voice of this nineteenth century verging on its close, from the mouth of a man little more than of age, living in the first half of the sixteenth!10
The business of the coronation at Bologna concluded, the Emperor betook himself to Germany in view of the great Diet of Augsburg, formally inaugurated in the summer of 1530, accompanied of course by his confessor, as the confessor was attended by his youthful secretary. And here it must have been that Servetus saw and may perchance have spoken with Melanchthon and others of the leading Reformers, among the number of whom, however, the greatest of them all did not appear. Luther’s friends believed that the danger he must run by showing himself at Augsburg was too great to be incurred. The brave man would himself have faced the peril, but his princely protectors positively forbade the exposure. They feared that at Augsburg the Emperor might be tempted to violate the ‘safe conduct’ he had been reproached by his Papal advisers with having so honourably observed at Worms; for there were still some among the Roman Catholics, high in place, so ill-informed, so blind to events, as to believe that were the head of the man who had inaugurated the movement which compromised their power but off his shoulders, the Reformation would collapse and die! Luther was therefore permitted by his friends to approach the scene of action on this occasion no nearer than Coburg.
Neither at Augsburg any more than at Worms did matters proceed so entirely to the satisfaction of the Emperor as he wished, and may have anticipated. The Protestant princes, with little cohesion among themselves, showed, nevertheless, that severally they were more resolute than ever in their requirements touching religion, less obsequious too to the advances of their suzerain than he found agreeable. They felt themselves in fact, and in so far, masters of the situation, and had mostly quitted Augsburg before the sittings of the Diet came to a close, content to leave Melanchthon and his colleagues to give final shape to the business for which the Diet had been mainly convoked, and in the great Religious Charter of the Age—the Confession of Augsburg—to establish Protestantism as an integral and recognised element, not only in the religious, but in the political system of Europe.
During his attendance on his chief at Augsburg, Servetus, though he saw and may have spoken with more than one of the distinguished Reformers, could have been an object of particular attention to none of them: his youth and subordinate position precluded the possibility of this. That he may have been disappointed at not seeing the original of the great movement which had brought together the august assembly he looked on around him, we may well believe, but we find no evidence in contemporary documents that would lead us to think he had ever come into contact with Luther, as has been said.11
CHAPTER III.
THE SERVICE WITH QUINTANA COMES TO AN END.
It is greatly to be regretted that we have nothing from Servetus on the other impressions he received, during the term of his service with Quintana, beside those connected with the pomp and power of the Papacy. We do not even know precisely how long he continued with the confessor of the Emperor, nor where, nor at what moment he left him. Neither have we a word of his whereabouts and mode of life, after vacating his office, until we meet him seeking an interview with Jehan Hausschein, the individual, with his name turned into Greek, so familiar to the world as Œcolampadius. From Servetus himself we have it that he quitted the service of Quintana on his death, which, he says, occurred in Germany. But the truth of this statement has been called in question on very sufficient grounds, Quintana having been seen alive in the flesh, and still in attendance on the Emperor, years after dates at which we know positively that Servetus had been in Basle and Strasburg, communicating with Œcolampadius, Bucer, and others of the Reformers. More than this, he had come before the world as author of the book entitled ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ a copy of which having been found by Joannes Cochlæus, an ecclesiastic in the suite of the Emperor, in a bookseller’s shop at Ratisbon, was by him shown to Quintana, who, we are informed, expressed extreme disgust that a countryman of his own and personally known to him—quem de facie se nôsse dicebat—should have fallen so far into the slough of heresy as to write on the mystery of the Trinity in the style of Michael Servetus, alias Revés.12 Nor indeed is this the last we hear of Quintana. After the settlement of affairs at Ratisbon and Nürnberg, he attended the Emperor to Italy, and thence to his native Spain, where we find him installed as Prior of the Church of Monte Aragon and a member of the Cortes of the kingdom. Quintana appears in fact to have lived for yet two years, actively engaged in his duties, having only been gathered to his fathers towards the end of the year 1534.13
Servetus did not therefore leave the service of Quintana after, or in consequence of, the death of the confessor. We find it difficult indeed to think of one with the decidedly unorthodox opinions to which Servetus had attained at an early period of his life, continuing on terms of intimacy with a man of Quintana’s