We can but excuse the irritation that mastered Servetus now, and lament that with Berthelier’s disastrous countenance misleading him, he neglected the chance that was undoubtedly offered him to save his life, had it been but by a show of moderation and conciliatory bearing. Calvin, however, must have persevered for a while with the unfortunate physician, and brought him to reply to more than one of the principles of his system produced against him. Among others, we find him reported as maintaining that wherever the word _Son_ is met with in the Scriptures, it is the _man_ Jesus that is to be understood; and when _Christ_ is spoken of as the Word and the Eternal Son, the language is to be taken in a _potential_ not in an actual sense; neither Light, Logos, nor Son having existed otherwise than in the mind of God before creation; the actual or real Son in particular having only begun to be when engendered in the womb of the Virgin Mary--and so on, the discourse turning upon matters transcending man’s power to know, and falling wholly within the domain of faith or belief. On the last topic brought under review, Servetus from the beginning of his career was always empathic. ‘Si unum iota mihi ostendas quo Verbum illud Filius vocetur, aut de Verbi generatione fiat mentio, fatebor me devictum. Ubi Scriptura dicit Verbum, dicit et ipse Verbum; ubi Filius, Filius; scilicet: olim Verbum, nunc vero Filius.’ These are his words in his earliest work, and from their tenor he never swerved.[91] The interview ended as we may imagine it could only end--with increased irritation on the part of the Ministers at the obstinate self-will of the heretic, as they interpreted it, and without a ray of new light having made its way into the mind either of the prisoner or his visitors. His would-be enlighteners, however--he thinking that they stood much in need of enlightenment from him--were particular, before taking their leave, in insisting on the right of the temporal power in the state to repress and punish theological error. Heretics, as they said, being liable by the Justinian Code, still in force over Europe, to be proceeded against and punished as criminals; and he having, in a highly objectionable manner, attacked many among the most sacred of the divine ordinances, would have no reason to complain did he find himself dealt with in the severest fashion as a blasphemer of the Church of God, and disturber of the peace of Christendom.