Although what is said above about Calvin’s private interference with the course of justice has been questioned, when we know that he denounced his opponent from the pulpit in no measured terms, and tampered with the ministers of the Swiss Churches when they were consulted on the case, we need not be too scrupulous in accepting the statement as true. He may have been alarmed by reports of something like wavering on the part of certain members of the Court, and even of questions raised as to the propriety of continuing a suit involving matters so much out of the usual course of criminal procedure as known at Geneva, and the competence of laymen to take such subjects into consideration at all. Rumours to this effect reaching his ears may have led him into a course the impropriety of which in calmer moments he might possibly have understood. But Calvin was wholly without that freedom from passion and that sense of relative equity which go to the constitution of the judicial mind. He lived in a perpetual imbroglio of quasi-criminal proceedings, mostly begotten by his own arbitrary legislation; and he was in the constant habit of interfering in suits before the Courts of Geneva, less as jurisconsult than as judge--as judge, too, in causes so commonly his own. Clerical writers who have lauded his comments on the criminal proceedings of Geneva have not seen these in their true bearings, or they would have expressed themselves more guardedly than they have done.[79] That proposals had really been made at the meeting of the 21st to abandon further proceedings against the prisoner, though overruled by the majority, seems to be proclaimed by the resolution then come to, viz., ‘Inasmuch as the heresies charged against Michael Servetus appear to be of great importance to Christianity, resolved to continue the prosecution.’ Such a resolution, though we have no intimation of that which led up to it, coupled with Calvin’s activity out of doors, suffices to show that Servetus had really had a chance of escape from the grip of his pursuer at this particular moment. But the occasion passed; and by way of strengthening themselves in their determination to go on with the questionable business in which they were engaged, we now find the Councillors of the Protestant city of Geneva actually writing to the Popish authorities of Vienne, and making inquiry of them as to the grounds on which Michael Servetus of Villanova, physician, had been imprisoned and prosecuted by them, and how he had escaped from confinement.