Although God elects us as the potter does his clay, it by no means follows that we are nothing more than clay. Paul’s simile deceives you; it is not universally applicable.’ The Law of Moses, Calvin has said, is still in force and to be observed by us as truly as it was by the Jews; violating it, he says, we violate the Law of God. Servetus’s reply to this is the burden of the Twenty-third and three following Letters. ‘I fancy I hear some Jew or Mussulman speaking here,’ says our respondent. ‘But to what is violence done--is it to a stone, or to certain letters cut in a stone? Christ, I say, accomplished the Law and then it was abrogated; in him we have the New Covenant, the Old superseded; in him are we made free. The law of Moses was unbearable; it slew the soul, it increased sin, it begat anger; virtue itself through it became at times transgression, and in compassion for our frailty it was annulled. You make God exercise a rude and miserable people in a mill-round. What would you say were some tyrant to require mountains of gold or the stars of heaven from your Genevese, and threaten them with death for non-compliance with his demands? But the Old Law bound men to impossibilities. Art thou not then ashamed of slavery and tyrannical violence? Insisting on the observance of this law, you yet go on dreaming with your Luther, and saying that no one ever entirely fulfilled the commandment which says “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and soul.” David and others, then, who said that they sought God with all their heart and strove with all their might to keep his commandments, are but liars to you. _And what, after all, are the laws of Moses? If conformable to Nature then are they the laws of God, the author of Nature, older than Moses, and to be observed of Christians independently of Moses._ But God never required obedience of the kind you imagined; he but asks of each according to his strength. Cease then, O Calvin, to torture us with the law of Moses, and to insist on its observance. It looks as if you had a mind to be pitied of God in your impotency--of God who may be said so often to have had to take pity on the Jews when they were under the law.’ Who shall say that Michael Servetus was not in advance of John Calvin?