The task which the public Prosecutor had set himself of showing up Servetus as an ill-conditioned and quarrelsome person, as a debauchee and evil-liver, and in the imputed licentiousness and irregularities of his life to find a motive for his attack on the dogmas of the Christian faith, was, therefore, a complete failure. The Attorney-General of Geneva did not imagine, as it seems, that the man who differed in his speculative theological opinions from the masses, who follow their leaders like sheep, could be other than an enemy to both God and man. All the charges in the direction now taken, unsupported as they were by a shadow of evidence, fell to the ground. Servetus could say with truth that he was no disturber of the peace--had never in the whole course of his life provoked a personal quarrel, and if he had once drawn his sword, as hinted, it was not as aggressor, but in self-defence. By physical constitution he said he was indisposed to matrimony; his not having entered into that holy state being, as we have seen, one of the items laid to his charge! Far from having failed in chastity of life, he declared that he had been ever studious of Scripture precepts on the subject, and was even bold enough to think that he had always lived as a Christian. And truly and in so far as aught to the contrary was made to appear in the course of the protracted and searching trial to which he was subjected, Servetus must be held to come out stainless. The logical conclusion, however, that speculative theological opinions, whether in conformity with or adverse to accredited systems of belief, had no influence one way or another on man’s moral conduct, was lost upon Calvin and his age; and the vulgar world of to-day cannot yet be said to have bettered their opinion. The prosecution, losing ground the longer it continued on this tack, reverted to what for it was the surer course--the assumed danger to the cause of society and the peace of Christendom from the publication of books having the character ascribed to those written by the prisoner. In spite of all the warnings he had had, said Mr. Attorney Rigot, the kind and repeated admonitions of learned theologians, sole authorities on such subjects, and the unanimous condemnation his first publication had encountered, he not only continued to adhere to his errors, but with a view to spread them farther had written and printed a second, which was in fact but a reproduction and enlarged edition of the first.