The feeling evinced of late by the Court, in the prisoner’s favour, appears now to have extended to the town; the liberal party, the native Genevese, opposed to Calvin, making of his prosecution of the solitary stranger a handle against him; his friends on the contrary speaking of it as proclaiming him the undaunted defender of the cause of God and religion! The trial we therefore see had become the occasion of alarm to one political party in the state, of hope to another, and of peculiar significance to both. Under present circumstances, matters proceeding in nowise to his satisfaction, Calvin must come again to the front; and we have it on unquestionable authority that it was at this, the very crisis in the fate of Servetus, that the Reformer was guilty of the crying injustice of availing himself of his pulpit, and in the face of numerous congregations denouncing and vilifying his opponent in no measured terms, exposing his unorthodox opinions in their most glaring and repulsive aspects, proclaiming what he characterised as their impious, blasphemous, demoralising nature, and thundering reproaches on the mistaken sympathy that had lately begun to be entertained for the author of such infamies. By right or by wrong Calvin was resolved that his old theological enemy, now turned, as he believed, into their tool for his humiliation by his political opponents, should not escape him. CHAPTER VII. THE TRIAL CONTINUED--THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL RECEIVES FRESH INSTRUCTIONS FOR ITS CONDUCT. In the course of this extraordinary trial there seems never to have been the slightest difficulty made about shifting the grounds of the Accusation. The particulars on which the prisoner was interrogated were scarcely the same in all respects on any two successive days, and often wide as the poles asunder of the proper articles of impeachment produced against him. The petition just presented by the prisoner was thus, without scruple as without challenge, now made the ground of a series of questions and harangues by the prosecutor, studiously calculated to prejudice him in the eyes of his Judges. Rigot had in fact made a great mistake in his own articles of inculpation. The prisoner, as it seemed, was even likely to escape through his mismanagement; but, otherwise advised, and as if to make amends for the line he had taken at first, he now showed himself either indisposed or afraid to follow further the dictates of his own more equitable nature. He had been in conclave with Calvin and received fresh instructions from him, as Servetus affirmed without being contradicted. Rigot, in truth, was no longer free, but cowed by the stern resolve of the man of mind and iron will.[85]