It was at this moment precisely, whilst debate and dispute, ecclesiastical and civil, were at their height, that Michael Servetus reached Geneva, and altogether unwittingly and unwillingly on his part became a subject of contention between the party of free thought, now in open rebellion against Calvin and the more rigid of his blind or compliant followers. And we shall possibly see reason to conclude that Servetus, though tried for heresy and finally condemned and done to death by slow fire for blasphemy against God, was in some measure also the victim of the political situation--the scape-goat of the two parties contending for supremacy in Geneva. Had there been less of political rancour there in the year 1553, and Servetus been allowed competent counsel to defend him, it seems to us, on the most careful consideration of the whole subject, that the proceedings would not have been suffered to take the turn they did, which led inevitably to his condemnation to death, whilst the memory of Calvin would have escaped the portentous blot that goes so far to obscure all the other great qualities that attach to his name. The world might then have had triumphs within the domain of physical science other than the discovery of the lesser circulation of the blood, from the man of genius; and the Reformation--type of the holy cause of human progress--have advanced without the lamentable compromise of principle it suffered when its leaders sent one of the very foremost men of his age to the stake.