Like the leaders of other bands of enthusiasts of which the world has seen so many, Servetus, relying on the New Testament record, thought that the day was at hand when Christ should appear in the clouds to judge the world and consummate all things. He overlooked the fact that Paul, whom he resembled in so many respects, had had the same fancy fifteen hundred years before him, and that matters had nevertheless gone on much as they had always done, without the day of judgment having dawned. Calvin with his educated understanding and his experience of the world, ought to have seen Servetus as the pious enthusiast he was in fact, and not as the enemy of God and Religion, as well as of himself. Failing to cure him of his extravagant fancies, he might safely have left him to indulge them, as being little likely to compromise his own or any other system of Christianity, the Papacy perhaps excepted, to which the would-be Restorer was truly much more violently opposed than the Reformer. But hate had blinded Calvin; considerations personal to himself had complicated and in some sort superseded such as were associated with religion. On the subject of Faith, to which Calvin’s system gave much less free play than Luther’s, we find Servetus siding with him of the North rather than him of the South. Neither of them, however, as we have seen, had any conception of faith in the way Servetus understood it. Faith, says he, consists in a certain compliant state of mind, proclaimed by unquestioning assent. This, the true saving faith, is of the kind avowed by Peter when he declared Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yet faith even of this kind, distinctly as it has the lead in Servetus’s Christology, is not yet all in all: to become efficient or saving, it must be conjoined with Charity. ‘If faith be not clothed with charity,’ says he, ‘it dies in nakedness; and as habit is strengthened by action, the body by exercise, and the understanding by study, so is faith strengthened by good works.’ The subject-will and fatalism, asserted by Calvin in his doctrine of predestination and election, have therefore no real foundation in Scripture; nay more, there is unreason in the assumption of such a principle, and in the admonition given to mankind to do that which it must be known beforehand they cannot do. ‘You speak,’ says our writer, ‘of free acts, yet really say that there is no such thing as free action. But who so devoid of understanding as to prescribe free choice to one incapable of choosing freely! It is mere fatuity besides to derive subject-will from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us; but in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will, choose, determine, and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all things proceed essentially from him. The Spirit of God is innate in man, and as the power to do is one thing, so is the necessity to do another.