But enough of this--more than enough, indeed, is before the reader to enable him to judge of the kind of matter that never yet influenced man in his conduct towards either God or his fellow, on which Michael Servetus was adjudged to die. The answers of Servetus to the incriminated passages of his book are obviously by no means either so full or so satisfactory as he might easily have made them; neither are they always so worded as unequivocally to express his proper views; but of more moment than all, they are given without the references to Scripture which the Court had suggested, and would certainly have had greater weight with it than aught else that could be urged. Though he uses the words person and hypostasis, we know that he did not understand them in the same way as theologians generally. He did not acknowledge any proper personality in the nature of God, who to him was invisible, all-pervading Essence, inscrutable too, save as manifesting and making himself known in Creation. Servetus’s persons and hypostases are modes or manifestations of God in nature, and, not limited to three, are, in truth, infinite in number, and proclaimed in an infinity of ways. To accommodate himself in some sort to such conceptions as were current on the subject of the Trinity, he uses language at times which it seems might fairly bring him within the pale of orthodoxy, were we not aware of the arbitrary meaning he attaches to the terms employed: God, Father, all-pervading Being; Christ, Son, visible manifestation of God to man; Holy Ghost, Angel--ἐνέργεια, actuating force in nature. Such, as we understand him, was the kind of Trinity formulated by Servetus. The answers of the prisoner to the new articles of incrimination were now ordered by the Court, which has nothing to say to them itself, to be put into the hands of the Reformer for his strictures. This gave Calvin the opportunity which he did not fail to turn to the best advantage. Treating Servetus’s Replies in a very different spirit from that in which the Spaniard had treated his Articles, he proceeded elaborately to criticise and refute them; in other words, and more properly, to demonstrate the incongruity and incompatibility of Servetus’s admitted beliefs and opinions touching the transcendental propositions involved, with the orthodox conclusions of himself and the Churches generally. To a theologian like Calvin such a task presented no difficulties; but the thoroughness of his exposition or refutation, and the length to which it runs, assure us of the pains he bestowed on the work. Calvin is said to have spent no more than two or three days in the composition of this elaborate paper; had the time been two months and more, it would have been little, and few men, we apprehend, could have got through the work in less time.