THE year 1553 saw Europe full of tragedies, and to the earnest student of the Bible it must have seemed as if the days had come for the opening the second seal spoken of in the Book of Revelation, when peace should be taken from the earth and men should kill oneanother. One of these tragedies has a mournful interest this year, the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of its chief actor; yet it was but one of thousands of similar cases with which the history of the sixteenth century is stained. On October 27, shortly after twelve o’clock, a procession started from the town-hall of Geneva the chief magistrates of the city, the clergy in their robes, the Lieutenant Criminel and other officers on horseback, a guard of mounted archers, the citizens, with a motley crowd of followers, and in their midst, with arms bound, in shabby, dirty clothes, walked a man of middle age, whose intellectual face bore the marks of long suffering.

Passing along the rue St. Antoine through the gate of the same name, the cortege took its way towards the Golgotha of the city. Once outside the walls, a superb sight broke on their view : in the distance the blue waters and enchanting shores of the Lake of Geneva, to the west and north the immense amphitheatre of the Jura, with its snow-capped mountains, and to the south and west the lovely valley of the Rhone ; but we may well think that few eyes were turned away from the central figure of that sad procession. By his side, in earnest entreaty, walked the aged pastor, Farel, who had devoted a long and useful life to the service of his fellow citizens. Mounting the hill, the field of Champel was reached, and here on a slight eminence was the fateful stake, with the dangling chains and heaping bundles of faggots. At this sight the poor victim prostrated himself on the ground in prayer. In reply to the exhortation of the clergyman for a specific confession of faith, there was the cry, ‘Misericordia, misericordia! Jesu, thou Son of the eternal God, have compassion upon me!’ Bound to the stake by the iron chain, with a chaplet of straw and green twigs covered with sulphur on his head, with his long dark face, it is said that he looked like the Christ in whose name he was bound. Around his waist were tied a large bundle of manuscript and a thick octavo printed book. The torch was applied, and as the flames spread to the straw and sulphur and flashed in his eyes, there was a piercing cry that struck terror into the hearts of the bystanders. The faggots were green, the burning was slow, and it was long before in a last agony he cried again, `Jesu, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me!’ Thus died, in his forty-fourth year, Michael Servetus Villanovanus, physician, physiologist, and heretic.

Strange, is it not, that could he have cried, ‘ Jesu, thou Eternal Son of God!’ even at this last moment, the chains would have been unwound, the chaplet removed, and the faggots scattered ; but he remained faithful unto death to what he believed was the Truth as revealed in the Bible.

The story of his life is the subject of my address.

Michael Servetus, known also as Michel Villeneuve, or Michael Servetus Villanovanus, or, as he puts in one of his books, alias Reves, was a Spaniard born at Villanueva de Sigena, in the present province of Huesca. When on trial at Vienna, he gave Tudela, Navarre, as his birthplace, at Geneva, Villanueva of Aragon ; and at one place he gave as the date of his birth 15og, and at the other 1511. The former is usually thought to be the more correct. As at Villanueva de Sigena there are records of his family, and as the family altar, made by the father of Servetus, still exists, we may take it that at any rate the place of his birth is settled. The altar-screen is a fine piece of work, with ten paintings. I am indebted to Signor Antonio Virgili, of Barcelona, for the photograph of it here reproduced (fig. 2). Servetus seems to have belonged to a good family in easy circumstances, and at his trial he said he came of an ancient race, living nobly.

From the convent school he probably went to the neighbouring University of Saragossa. Possibly he may have studied for the priesthood, but however that may be, there is evidence that he was a precocious youth, and well read in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the
last two very unusual accomplishments at that period.

We next hear of him at Toulouse, studying canon and civil law. He could not have been twenty when he entered the service of the Friar Quintana, confessor to the Emperor Charles V, apparently as his private secretary. In the suite of the Emperor he went to Italy, and was present when Pope and Emperor entered Bologna, and ‘he saw the most powerful prince of the age at the head of 20,000 veterans kneeling and kissing the feet of the Pope.’ Here he had his first impression of the worldliness and mercenary character of the Papacy, hatred of which, very soon after, we find to have become an obsession.

In the summer of 1530 the Emperor attended the Diet of Augsburg, where the Princes succeeded in getting Protestantism recognized politically. Such a gathering must have had a profound influence on the young student, already, we may suppose, infected with the new doctrines. Possibly at Saragossa, or at Toulouse, he may have become acquainted with the writings of Luther. Such an expression of opinion as the following, written before his twenty-first year, could scarcely have been of a few months’ growth : `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.’ (Willis.) How far he held any personal communication with the German reformers is doubtful. It is quite possible, and Tollin, his chief biographer, makes him visit Luther. We do not know how long he held service with Quintana, Tollin thinks a year and a half. It is not unlikely that the good friar was glad to get rid of a young secretary infected with heresy so shocking as that contained in his first book, published in 1531 ; indeed, there is a statement to the effect that a monk in the suite of Quintana found the book in a shop at Ratisbon and hastened to tell the confessor of its terrible contents. Servetus had plunged headlong into studies of the most dangerous character, and had even embooked them in a small octavo volume, entitled De Trinitatis Erroribus, which appeared without the printer’s name, but on the
title-page the author, Michael Serveto, alias Reves ab Aragonia, Hispanum, and with the date MDXXXI. In the innocency of his heart he thought the work would be a good introduction to the more liberal of the Swiss reformers, but they would have none of it, and were
inexpressibly shocked at its supposed blasphemies.
Nor did he fare better at Strassburg ; and even the kind-hearted Bucer said that the author of such a work should be disembowelled and torn in pieces. In thorny theological questions a layman naturally seeks shelter, and I am glad to quote the recent opinion of a distinguished student of the period, Professor Emerton,l on this youthful phase of the life of Servetus. ‘He would not admit that the eternal Son of God was to appear as man, but only that a man was to come who should be the Son of God. This is the earliest intimation we have as to the speculations which were occupying the mind of the young scholar. It is
highly significant that from the start he was impressed with what we should now call the historical view of theology. As he read the Old Testament, its writers seemed to him to be referring to things that their hearers would understand. Their gaze into the future was limited by the fortunes of the people at the moment. To imagine them possessed of all the divine mysteries, and to have in mind the person of the man Jesus as the ultimate object of all their prophetic vision, was to reflect back the knowledge of history into a past to which such knowledge was impossible. So far as I can understand him, this is the key to all Servetus’ later thought. His manner of expressing himself is confusing and intricate to the last degree, so much so that neither
in his own time nor since has any one dared to say that he understood it. To his contemporaries he was a halfmad fanatic ; to those who have studied him, even sympathetically, his thought remains to a great extent enigmatical ; but this one point is fairly clear : that he grasped, as no one up to his time had grasped, this one central notion, that, whatever the divine plan may have been, it must be revealed by the long, slow movement of history-that, to understand the record of the past, it must be read, so far as that is possible, with the mind of those to whom it was immediately addressed, and must not be twisted into the meanings that may suit the fancy of later generations: ‘To have seized upon such an idea as this-an idea which has begun to come to its rights only within our memories-was an achievement which marks this youth of twenty as at all events an extraordinary individual, a disturbing element in his world, a man who was not likely to let the authorities rest calmly in possession of all the truth there was.’

In the following year, 1532, two dialogues appeared, explanatory and conciliatory, a little book which only aggravated the offence, and feeling the Protestant atmosphere too hot, Servetus went to Paris. Dropping this name by which he has been known, and closing this
brief but stormy period, for the next twenty-one years we now follow Michel Villeneuve, or Michael Villanovanus, in a varied career as student, lecturer, practitioner, author and editor, still nursing the unconquerable hope that the world might be reformed could he but restore the primitive doctrine of the Church.

END PART 1