Calvin was not one of those individuals 'who remain in doubt and suspense;' from the very first he detected pantheism and materialism under the veils with which these men sought from time to time to conceal their errors, and boldly pointed them out. His uprightness and frankness presented a very striking contrast to their dissimulation and cunning. 'They turn their cloak inside out at every moment,' he said, 'so that you do not know where to hold them. One of the principal articles of their creed is that men ought to counterfeit, whilst even the heathens have said "that it is better to be a lion than a fox."'[173] He found that their doctrines were impious and revolutionary. To confound God with the world was (he thought) to take from the world the living personal God who is present in the midst of us; and consequently to expose not only the Reformation and Christianity but the whole social system to utter ruin. The conduct of these pretended 'spirituals' was already sufficient in his eyes to characterise and condemn their system. 'What has metamorphosed Quintin and his companions from tailors into teachers,' said Calvin, 'is that, preferring to be well fed and at their ease to working, they find it convenient to gain their living by prating, as priests and monks do by chanting.'[174] It was not until later that Calvin wrote his excellent treatise against the libertines;[175] but, says Theodore Beza, 'it was then (during his stay in Paris) that he first encountered those teachers who revived in our times the detestable sect of the Carpocratians, abolishing all difference between good and evil.'[176] He encountered a probably still more dangerous doctrine. [Sidenote: SERVETUS.] About that time a stranger, whose proceedings were rather mysterious, used to appear at rare intervals in the little circles of Paris. Many persons spoke highly of him. They said, he could not be reproached with any immoral tendencies, while his subtle understanding, his brilliant genius, his profound knowledge of natural science, and his fiery imagination, seemed as if they would make him one of the most surprising and influential leaders of the epoch. This was Michael Servetus, a man of the same age as Calvin. Born at Villenueva in Arragon, he had studied the law at Toulouse, and afterwards published a daring work entitled, _On the Errors of the Trinity_. He put himself forward as a teacher of truth and a thorough reformer. The great mysteries of faith were to give way to a certain pantheism, enveloped in mystical and Sabellian forms. It was not Roman-catholicism alone which he desired to reform, but the evangelical reformation also, substituting for its scriptural and practical character a philosophic and rationalistic tendency.