As every point in the several indictments was made subject of renewed inquiry, so do we now find further questions addressed to the prisoner on his life and social habits; for the prosecution, as we have seen, held it matter of moment to present him, if possible, as a person of immoral and ill-regulated life. They had not now, however, any more than formerly, a particle of evidence to show that he had ever lived otherwise than soberly, chastely, and respectably; and as to the allegation, brought up against him for the second time, that he had said women were not such paragons of virtue as to make matrimony necessary to secure their more intimate converse, he declared, as he had done already, that he had no recollection of ever having said anything of the kind; but if he had, it was by way of bravado, and to conceal a certain infirmity under which he laboured which indisposed or incapacitated him, as he believed, from entering on matrimony.[89] Making an abrupt change of front, the prosecutor now inquired of the prisoner what he meant by the passage in his book where he says that, ‘The Truth begins to declare itself and will be accomplished for all ere long.’ ‘Do you mean that your doctrine is the Truth, and will shortly be universally received?’ ‘I mean to speak of the progress of the Reformation,’ said Servetus; ‘the truth began to be declared in the time of Luther, and has gone on spreading since then until now.’ Had he stopped here, all would have been well and the answer must have been scored to his credit; but he went on to particularise and to say that ‘the Reformation would have to advance upon some matters which in his opinion were not yet well set forth.’ This was immediately seized upon as a challenge by the men who believed that the Reformation had already been accomplished or completed through them; so that he was forthwith required to explain what he meant by such language. Here, however, he dared not be outspoken; and though he made no denial of his doctrine, which was seen of all to be in his estimation the complement and crown of the Reformation, he diverged into a variety of topics, floundered, and wound up by proposing to enlighten the Court by a reference to the Bible and the Fathers, or to explain himself more fully than he had done in his book if they would grant him a conference, in their presence, with one or more men of learning. Pressed further, he said that he could not divine whether his doctrine would ever be generally accepted or not; but he believed and should continue to believe that it was founded in truth until shown to be otherwise. ‘Such things,’ said he in conclusion, ‘are commonly enough denounced and condemned as erroneous at first, but are by and by acknowledged for truth and universally accepted.’