IX. to XX. and XXVI. The whole of these articles, with wearisome prolixity and iteration, refer to the transcendental theological dogmas that touch on the way and manner in which Christ is to be regarded as the Son of God; the relationship in which He stands to the ‘Word’ of the Gospel according to John, and how the Word was made Flesh; in what respect Christ is God, and in what respect he is Man, and how, as the Son of God, he could have died like a man. To these recondite propositions Servetus replies in a way that has a sufficient look of orthodoxy, and was evidently intended by him so to appear. He avows his belief in the items generally on which he is challenged with unbelief; and it may be that he could do so with a clear conscience, he putting his own interpretation on the language he used. Christ he acknowledged as the Son of God, but this was because of his having been begotten in some mysterious way by the Deity in the womb of the Virgin Mary, He not having existed actually but only potentially in the mind of God before the epoch of his incarnation. Christ, however, he says, was _prefigured_ by the angels who make their appearance from time to time in the Hebrew Scriptures. When _persons_ are spoken of, further, they are to be thought of as _images_, _formalities_, not real entities or individuals; so that the three persons he acknowledges in the Godhead are but so many _dispensations_, _modes_, or _manifestations_ which the Invisible God makes of himself in creation. XXIV., XXV. and XXXV. These articles bear upon Servetus’s conceptions of the Deity, in whose Oneness of Being he declares that he yet acknowledges not merely three _hypostases_, as generally said, but a hundred thousand _dispositions_ or _dispensations_, so that God is part of ourselves, we part of His Spirit; the _ideas_ or _patterns_ of all creatures and of all things having been eternally present in the Divine Mind, though they only acquired form and substance in Creation. XXVII. and XXIX. Item: That he had said that the soul of man was mortal; that there was nothing immortal in fact, but an elementary breath, the soul having become mortal after Adam’s transgression. He replies by denying the allegations, and declares that he never thought the soul of man to be mortal; all he has said in his writings in connection with the subject of immortality being to the effect that the soul was clothed in corruptible elements which perished, not that the soul itself was mortal or died in its essence. XXX., XXXI., and XXXIII. Item: That he had spoken of Infant Baptism as a diabolical invention, competent to destroy the whole of Christianity. He admits that he has said so, and is still of this opinion; believing as he does that none should be baptized until they had attained to years of discretion. But he adds, that if it be shown him he is mistaken in this, he is ready to submit to correction.