Another important article of the impeachment brought into prominence in this day’s proceedings was from among the prisoner’s annotations to the reprint of Santes Pagnini’s Bible, which he supervised, as we know, for Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons. This Bible was said by the prosecution to be encumbered with many glosses or comments totally opposed to the Faith; the one most notably so of all perhaps being appended to the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah, where the servant of God who took on himself the sins of the people is spoken of by the Prophet. ‘This passage,’ said Calvin, ‘is referred by the prisoner to Cyrus, whilst every Christian Church refers it to Jesus Christ.’ But Servetus was again bold enough to maintain his position in so far as to say that the interpretation he had given of the passage was borne out in some sort by the opinions of the old Doctors of the Church, who acknowledged, as he said, a twofold sense in the Scriptures--one, literal and historical, applying to contemporaneous personages and events; another, mystical and prophetic, bearing on Christ and the future. ‘In speaking of the individual referred to, as he had done, and calling him Cyrus, he said that he nevertheless held the prophetical and most important bearing of the text to be on Christ.’ But this did not satisfy Calvin. He would by no means accept such an explanation, and far from attempting by reason and kindness to win the prisoner to views which he himself believed to be more in conformity with the truth, he launched out in passion, and declared that ‘the prisoner would never have had the hardihood thus villainously to corrupt so grand a passage had he not, abandoning all shame, taken he knew not what diabolical pleasure in getting rid of the whole Christian faith.’ The cool way in which Servetus stood this outburst appears to have irritated the Reformer extremely. Servetus was in truth far in advance of Calvin and his age in his exegesis. He was not blind, like all about him, to the true import of the Hebrew writings styled prophetical, but divined their only possible bearing upon events and individuals contemporaneous with their writers--in some cases even past and gone. It was to escape doing violence to the idea of the inspiration under which Servetus credited these ancient writings to have been composed, that he acknowledged a prospective reference to incidents still in the womb of far distant time.