See you not, then, that the question is the restoration of the Church driven from among us? The words of John show us that a battle was in prospect: seduction was to precede, the battle was to follow; and the time is now at hand. Who, think you, are they who shall gain the victory over the Beast? They, assuredly, who have not received his mark. Grant, O God, to thy soldier that with thy might he may manfully bear him against the Dragon, who gave such power to the Beast. Amen!’ In the above we have the whole mystical being of the man laid bare before us, and the nature of the cause in which he was engaged made known. Servetus certainly believed that he was an instrument in the hand of God for proclaiming a better saving faith to the world. It was by a certain Divine impulse, he says himself, that he was led to his subject, and woe to him did he not evangelise! He seems even to have thought that he had his vocation shadowed out to him in his name. The angel Michael led the embattled hosts of heaven to war against the Dragon; and he, Michael Servetus, had been chosen to lead the angels on earth against Antichrist! The Roman interpretation of Christianity, with its Pope and hierarchy, its assumed sovereignty, its pompous ceremonial and ritualistic apparatus, had failed to make the world either wiser or better; the entire system was rotten to the core; hence the revolt of such scholarly monks as Erasmus and Luther, and of such learned priests as Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bullinger, Bucer, and the rest. But they, too, still showed more or less of the ‘mark of the Beast.’ They had rid themselves of the Mass and Transubstantiation, of compromises for sin by payments in money, of monkeries, nunneries, the invocation of saints, prayers to the Virgin, and so on; but they had retained much that was objectionable--particularly a Trinity of persons in the Godhead (tantamount, said Servetus, to the recognition of three Gods instead of one God), and infant baptism. By their strenuous insistance on the effects of Adam’s transgression as compromising mankind at large, and Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his only son, they had moreover interspersed the religion of Christ with such an amount of Judaism that their Christianity was in many respects a relapse into the bonds of the Law, from which Christ had set us free. A reformation of the Church had been commenced, therefore, but was by no means completed; much still remained to be done; the world was waiting, in fact, for a better interpretation of Christ’s life and doctrine as contained in the Gospels, and this the studies and meditations of Michael Servetus, he believed, qualified him in no mean measure to supply. Hence the books on Trinitarian Error and the Restoration of Christianity; and hence, also, the hostility of Calvin and his followers, who were minded that they had already reformed and restored, and verily represented, or were in fact, the true Church.