Had Calvin been minded to help instead of
determined to crush Servetus, he might even have quoted Luther, who
speaks in this wise in his Table Talk: ‘God is present in all created
things, and so in the smallest leaflet and tiniest poppy-seed--Gott
also gegenwärtig ist in allen Creaturen; auch im geringsten Blättlein
und Mohnkörnlein.’
Nor were the personal griefs of Calvin overlooked in the inculpation of
the prisoner. Beside the thirty letters printed in the ‘Christianismi
Restitutio,’ addressed to the Reformer, a copy of his ‘Institutions’
was now laid before the Court. This, like the MS. of the ‘Restitutio,’
sent privately and confidentially to Calvin, was covered on the margins
with numerous annotations, little in conformity, as may be supposed,
with the accepted tenets of the Church of Geneva, and more rarely still
complimentary to the author. At such insolent procedure we know that
Calvin was greatly offended, as appears by the language he thought fit
to use when writing to Viret and incidentally noticing the liberties
that had been taken with him by the annotator: ‘There is not a page of
the book,’ he says, ‘that is not befouled with his vomit.’
Neither was the tergiversation of the prisoner in what he had said
about Geroult’s part in the printing of the ‘Restitutio’ unnoticed. He
is now reproached with the variations in his replies on the subject to
the Lieutenant on the 14th, and to the Court on the 15th. His first
answer we believe was truthful--Geroult knew all about the book, as we
shall find from a letter of Arnoullet to his friend Bertet; his second
was untruthful, but uttered to shield the man who had aided him in his
enterprise, compromised, as he had come to see, by what he had said
before.
CHAPTER V.
THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE, WITH THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF GENEVA AS
PROSECUTOR.
Arrived at this stage, all the documents on which it was proposed to
proceed being before the Court, and something more than a presumption
of the prisoner’s heretical opinions having already been made to
appear, Nicolas de la Fontaine, on his petition to that effect, and
his bail, Anthony Calvin, were formally discharged as parties to the
suit, its further prosecution being handed over to Claude Rigot, the
Attorney-General of the city of Geneva.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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