From the letters which Calvin now wrote to several of his friends, particularly to Sulzer, of Basle, we learn that he was much averse to the idea of this appeal to the Churches. Having been foiled by them in his prosecution of Bolsec, he must have feared that what had happened before might happen again. He knew that he was less considered abroad than at home, and seems not to have apprehended that the appeal now resolved on, was not only to ensure his own triumph, but to make the Reformed Churches of Switzerland participators in his sin of intolerance and abettors of the error (to give it no worse name) he committed when he brought Servetus to his death. CHAPTER X. THE TRIAL IS INTERRUPTED THROUGH DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CALVIN AND THE COUNCIL. The Churches were to be appealed to, then, and Calvin applied himself immediately to make the best he could of the case as it stood. With the diligence that distinguished him, we need not doubt of his having been soon ready with the Articles upon which the trial of Servetus may be said to have entered on its third, if it were not its fourth and definite, phase.[92] But a notable interval elapsed before we find the Council giving any heed to the new Articles of Indictment, or taking steps to have them despatched to the Cantons. The Council had business of another kind to engage them, with Calvin and his friends as their opponents on grounds of policy, instead of their instigators and guides in a trial for heresy. It was at this precise time that the struggle to which we have alluded in our review of the political situation took place between Calvin and the Council on the right exercised by the Consistory to excommunicate or deprive of Church privileges those who were known to have infringed one or another of its arbitrary religious, moral, or sumptuary regulations. Philibert Berthelier, having offended in this direction, had fallen under the ban of the Consistory some time before; but, having now appealed to the Council for redress against what he held to be an unjust award, his party were powerful enough not only to obtain a decision in his favour, but to have the Consistory deprived of the right to excommunicate at all.