Calvin remained the victor in his struggle with the political Libertines; but he was engaged in another contest--a series of theological controversies with the heretical Libertines. He was laying the foundations of the religious system and independence of the reformed Christian Church, but he was also labouring to uphold the Christian evangelical faith within that Church. The three principal and most formidable characteristics of the sixteenth century were its political disturbances, its public immorality, and its ardent outburst of intellectual life, and Calvin was simultaneously resisting all of them. I will not attempt to follow him into the arena where he successfully opposed the numerous speculative theologians who hovered around the great reformers of the century,--Caroli, Bolsec, Castellio, Westphal, Gribaldo, Valentinus Gentilis, Biandrata, Osiander, and many others. {293} But I will select two of the most daring thinkers with whom he was brought into contact, Michael Servetus and Lælius Socinus; both of them celebrated, one for his tragical end, and the other as the forerunner of his nephew, Faustus Socinus, the founder of the well-known sect of Socinians. Two very different sides of the character of Calvin are displayed in his connexion with these two men; his harsh severity towards those opponents whom he despised, and his moderation and almost gentle tolerance towards those whom he esteemed, and believed to be sincere and humble. In the year 1509, the very same year in which Calvin was born at Noyon, Michael Servetus was born at Villanueva, a city of Arragon, where his father, a burgess of some eminence, was a notary. He received his early education in a Dominican convent, and his father afterwards sent him to study law at Toulouse, just as Calvin's father had wished him to pursue the same study at Orleans and Bourges. In like manner as Calvin in his youth had received assistance and protection from an ecclesiastic, so also the first patron of Servetus was a priest,--Quintana, father-confessor of the Emperor Charles V., whom Servetus accompanied to Italy, an obscure member of the imperial suite. In spite, however, of this patronage and of his youth, he was strongly imbued with the novel opinions of the time; for when he afterwards recalled the recollections of his visit to Rome, he says: 'I saw there with my own eyes the Pope carried on the heads of the princes of the land, and worshipped in the public squares by a whole people on their knees; so much so that those who could kiss his feet, or even his shoes, thought themselves blessed above all others. O beast, the most murderous of all beasts! O harlot, the most shameless of all harlots! Surely this was the beautiful harlot described in the Book of Isaiah.' [Footnote 104] [Footnote 104: Isaiah, chap, xlvii. Henry, iii. 107.] {294}