But Law, we believe, was never the subject that engrossed the thoughts of Servetus. The natural bent of his mind, and the teaching he had received during his earlier years, led him to Theology; and it was at Toulouse, as he tells us himself, that he first made acquaintance with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is not difficult to imagine the effect which the perusal of these writings must have produced on the ardent religious temperament of Servetus. In his earliest work he speaks of the Bible as a book come down from heaven, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science--language, however, that is to be seen as hyperbole to a great extent; for he was already imbued with scholastic philosophy, and, we must presume, with patristic theology also, before he had read a word of the Bible; and in his published works we find him at various times subordinating the teaching of the Scriptures to the conclusions of his reason. Toulouse, indeed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, was an unlikely school for religious study in any but the most rigidly orthodox fashion; and how far Michael Servetus swerved from this--to his sorrow--need not now be more particularly noticed. It was even the boast of the Toulousans for long, that their city had not been infected with what was spoken of as the poison of Lutheranism. So strict a watch had been kept over them by their shepherds, the priests, that, whilst in neighbouring and other more distant cities of France the Reformation had many adherents, it had none--openly, at all events--in Toulouse. It were needless to insist that training of a special kind, in addition to originality and independence of mind, was required to lead to views and conclusions such as those attained to by Servetus.[3] He had read the Bible, however, at Toulouse; and there, too, if it were not at an earlier period, he must have met with some of the writings of Luther, of which several had been translated into Spanish soon after their publication.[4] But there is another book which enjoyed an extensive reputation through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seems to supply the kind of aliment precisely of which a mind constituted like that of Servetus must have felt the want. This is the ‘Theologia Rationalis sive Liber de Creaturis’ of Raymund de Sabunde, in which the Creator is reached by a gradual ascent from lower to higher grades of created things.