The printing of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ was next adduced and made a principal topic of accusation against the prisoner. To the question what object he had proposed to himself in having the book printed, he replied that his main purpose was to ventilate his opinions and have them controverted in case they were seen to be erroneous. But Calvin rejoined that it was by no means necessary to print in order to obtain correction of erroneous opinions, and this more especially in a case such as his, where, as writer, he had already been admonished of his errors. The delicate, difficult, and most essential element in the impeachment, that, namely, having reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity, was now and again brought into the foreground. Particularly questioned on this subject, Servetus maintained, that previous to the Council of Nicæa no Doctor of the Church had used the word _Trinity_; and that if the Fathers did acknowledge a distinction in the Divine Essence, it was not _real_ but _formal_; that the _persons_ were nothing more in truth than _dispensations_ or modes, not distinct entities or _persons_ in the usual acceptation of that word. If he had called the Doctrine of the Trinity, as commonly understood, a dream of St. Augustine and an invention of the Devil, which he did not deny; if he had further characterised the Trinity of modern theologians as a three-headed monster, like the Cerberus of the poets, and styled those who overlooked the true Trinity, which he himself recognised, as Tritheists, it was solely because he believed the unity of God to be denied or annulled by such a procedure. Colladon on this--and prompted we may presume by Calvin--maintained that the views imputed to the Fathers of the Church by the prisoner were false as well as mischievous, and that he could adduce none but apocryphal writings full of absurdities in support of what he said.