Rigot appears from his articles, which have no look of having been dictated by Calvin, to have regarded Servetus as one whose efforts from first to last had been directed to the confusion of society through the teaching of an immoral doctrine and the example of a dissolute life. To force an avowal of so much from the lips of the prisoner himself was therefore the main drift of the Attorney’s interrogatories. Must not the prisoner be aware, said he, that his teaching gives licence to youth to overflow in debauchery, adultery, and other social crimes, as he maintains that there is neither sin nor misdemeanour in such misdeeds, and no punishment due to them under the age of twenty years? Why had he not himself entered into the holy state of matrimony? Had he not studied the Koran and other profane books for arguments in favour of Jews, Turks, and the like, and to controvert the doctrines of all the Christian Churches? Had he not been imprisoned elsewhere than at Vienne through having been guilty of various crimes and misdemeanours? Had he not been a party to quarrels in which he had wounded another as well as been wounded himself? If he had not led a dissolute and immoral life, showing neither care nor zeal for all that became a Christian, what could have induced him to treat adversely so much that lies at the root of the Christian Religion? Had he not come, in fact, to Geneva with a view to spread his doctrines and to trouble the Church as there established? With whom had he had communication since he came? Had he not spoken with William Geroult, and was not Geroult aware of his intention to come to Geneva? and so on, in the same strain, the questions amounting to as many as thirty. But this was ground on which Servetus felt himself secure; he could reply to all that was asked of him now with a clear conscience, and without reticence or prevarication. He had nothing to hide in his past life. No moral delinquency had been laid to his charge, and though he may have had a squabble with the Faculty of Paris, the doctors were notoriously a contentious crew, always quarrelling among themselves, though they never, like the theologians, went the length of burning one another. There was little, therefore, to be said on that head; for the rest, he had lived soberly, honourably, industriously; earning his bread in the sweat of his brain, and for the last twelve or fourteen years had been incessantly engaged in the practice of his profession, neither using the sword nor the spear, but salving the bruises and stanching the wounds that men in their madness inflict on one another, and nobly ministering to the yet longer list of ills in the shape of fevers, fluxes, consumptions, apoplexies, cancers, dropsies, &c., &c., that waylay us on our course and give us rest at length.