As to the alleged attacks on the Church of Geneva through the person of Calvin, he answered as before, and now added that all he had written against Calvin was with no view or desire to calumniate or injure him, but only to show him his errors; and he now offers in open congregation to make good his words by a variety of reasons, and the authority of the Scriptures. This was to throw down the gauntlet to Calvin and offer him battle on ground he could not decline, since he too acknowledged no authority but holy writ, and we need not doubt of his readiness to take up the pledge: there was nothing indeed, as he declared, for he was present in Court watching the proceedings, that he desired more than to show himself in such a cause before all the world.[74] The Court may be excused for having imagined that in agreeing to such a wordy duel between Calvin and Servetus they would be letting the question slip out of their proper hands; or, as M. Albert Rilliet[75] suggests, the friends whom Servetus had among its members, measuring the mental calibre of the two men, may have feared to see him they favoured worsted by his redoubtable opponent, whose dialectical skill and theological lore were so well known to all. Deciding against the proposal of the prisoner, therefore, the tribunal determined that the trial should proceed in the usual way. So far as they had gone we can readily conceive that the answers of Servetus must have seemed little satisfactory to the Court. On even a large proportion of the allegations made, they may have felt their incompetency to form an opinion; but upon a few they believed themselves fully able to come to a conclusion. What he had said on Infant Baptism in particular was greatly calculated to prejudice him in the minds of his Judges; the doctrine he held being one among the dangerous moral, social, and political principles of the Anabaptists, though the whole of these were emphatically disavowed and condemned by Servetus, who really appears to have had nothing in common with the dreaded sect but the opinion that Baptism should not be performed until years of discretion were attained, and that the rite should be solemnised by immersion or affusion, not by merely sprinkling the face with water.