Calvin has been strongly blamed for giving up these private letters and marginal notes to the Catholic authorities, who had already commenced proceedings against Servetus. It has been said that he laid the whole plot, and caused Servetus to be denounced, in order to destroy a religious adversary and personal enemy, by the instrumentality of the Catholic Church. His hesitation as to whether he ought to give up the papers and allow them to be sent to Lyons, shows that he had some doubt as to the moral rectitude of his conduct; but it shows an extraordinary misapprehension of his character to imagine that this hesitation was an act of hypocrisy, and that the surrender of the papers was a piece of premeditated perfidy. There are no errors, or rather no vices, with which it is so impossible to charge Calvin as with untruth and hypocrisy. {309} During the whole course of his life he openly avowed his thoughts and acknowledged his actions; he left his native country for ever, and the country of his adoption for a long period, just because he was resolved to assert his opinions, and to act according to his opinions. In his transactions with Servetus, he was brought into contact with a man who, whilst he aimed at becoming the most radical of reformers, lived for twelve years at Vienne as a strict Catholic, and secretly printed and distributed a profoundly anti-Christian book; then, seeing that he was in danger, denied his work and his acts, and protested 'that he had never desired to teach or maintain any doctrine opposed to the Church or the Christian religion.' Calvin felt the greatest contempt for so much untruth and cowardice; he openly condemned the book and the conduct of Servetus from the very first; he considered it both a right and a duty to prove the truth of that which he had affirmed, and to show at Lyons as well as at Geneva that the opinions of Servetus were the same as those put forward in the condemned volume, and that Servetus was really the author of it. 'It is reported,' said he, 'that I have contrived to have Servetus taken prisoner in the Papal dominions, that is at Vienne; and thereupon many say that I have not acted honourably in exposing him to the deadly enemies of the faith. There is no need to insist on my vigorously denying such a frivolous calumny, which will fall flat when I have said in one word that there is no truth in it. ... If there were any truth in the charge, I should not deny it, and I do not think that it would be at all discreditable to me.' [Footnote 119] [Footnote 119: Bungener, p. 362.] {310}