As it is part of our business here to learn on what grounds men of the highest culture burned one another to death three hundred and twenty-four years ago--and it is thought by some that there still remains such an amount of ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance in the world as might lead to a rekindling of the fires, were the power to do so but added to the will--we feel bound to make a somewhat particular study of the Articles on which the unfortunate Servetus was finally incriminated and doomed to die. We therefore proceed to lay before the reader, in slightly condensed form, these Articles, which will be seen, on the most cursory perusal, to involve none but topics of transcendental dogmatic theology--a subject which to reasonable men has now lost almost all the significance it once possessed, but which has still a large historical interest as showing, in contrast with present views, the progress that has been made from darkness into light; and as illustrating the great, yet persistently neglected, truth, that the religious feelings are no safe guides of conduct when dissevered from the other emotional elements of human nature in balanced action among themselves, enlightened by science and associated with reason. Religion has in fact at no time been the civiliser of mankind, as so commonly said, but has itself been the civilised through advances made in science or the knowledge of nature, and in general refinement. Brutal and blood-stained among savages and the barbarous but policied peoples of antiquity, Assyrians, Chaldæans, Egyptians, Hebrews; cruel and intolerant among Newer Nations well advanced in art and letters, but ignorant of the world they lived in and the universe around them, religion has only become humane as Science has been suffered to shed her ennobling light, and will first prove truly beneficent when Piety is seen to consist in study of the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, and Worship is acknowledged to be comprised in reverential observance of their behests. What adequate idea of God could be formed--if, indeed, it be possible for man to form any adequate idea of God!--so long as this earth--this mote in the ocean of Infinity--was thought of as the centre of the universe, the one object of God’s care, and a single family among the myriads that people it as the sole recipients of his revealed word and will!