Nor were it hard to imagine that he, smarting as he then was under the sense of all that had but just befallen him through the interference of the Reformer, and listening for the moment to the influential persons who promised him support, and possibly redress, was not altogether indisposed to pay his enemy back for the irreparable injury he had suffered at his hands. But there is nothing in all we know of Michael Servetus that leads us for a moment to think of him as a revengeful man; and though he may have lent an ear for a while to the suggestions of his new friends, he must soon have come to conceive misgivings as to the real meaning of their attentions. Even whilst lying hidden in his inn he could hardly have failed, after a while, to learn something of the state of political partisanship prevalent in the theocratic republican city of Geneva, and so have been more than ever anxious to be gone. Hence the nailing up of his chamber windows. On Sunday, August 13, he had even spoken to the landlord of the ‘Rose’ to procure him a boat for the morrow, to take him by the Lake as far as possible on his way to Zürich. But his resolution to delay his departure no longer was taken too late. Weary of confinement, and always piously disposed, he ventured imprudently to show himself at the evening service of a neighbouring church; and being there recognised, intimation of his presence in Geneva was conveyed to Calvin, who, without loss of a moment, and in spite of the sacredness of the day, denounced him to one of the Syndics, and demanded his immediate arrest. To effect this in the city of Geneva of the year of grace 1553 was no matter of difficulty, little being made in those days of seizing on the person, and not much of taking the life. The accredited officer, armed with a warrant, found Servetus in his inn; informed him he was to consider himself a prisoner; led him away, and threw him into the common jail of the town. CHAPTER II. GENEVA AND THE STATE OF POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE DATE OF SERVETUS’S ARREST. ‘The year 1553,’ says Beza, in his life of Calvin, ‘by the impatience and fury of the factious, was a year so full of trouble that not only was the Church, but the Republic of Geneva, within a hair’s breadth of being wrecked and lost; all power had fallen into the hands of the wicked (i.e., the patriotic party of freethought, opposed to Calvin, and designated the Libertines), that it seemed as though they were on the point of attaining the ends for which they had so long been striving.’ Eighteen years had then elapsed since the Reformation first found footing in Geneva, and twelve since Calvin had resumed his position--interrupted during a period of two years--as a sort of spiritual dictator--‘the Lycurgus of a Christian Democracy’--not only as Organiser of the Faith, and Minister in the Church, but as regulator and supervisor of the morals and manners of the people.