When we turn to Calvin’s Refutation of the Errors of Michael Servetus, we observe him setting out by saying that he will not imitate the prisoner in the use of uncivil language, but confine himself strictly to the matters in question. He would not be John Calvin, however, did he keep his word; and truly his language is at times little less offensive than that of Servetus; whilst his comments, uniformly adverse, are ever studiously calculated to damage the prisoner in the eyes of his Judges. ‘Whosoever,’ says Calvin in concluding his work, ‘will duly weigh all that is here adduced, will not fail to see that the whole purpose of Servetus has been to extinguish the light we have in the true doctrine, and so put an end to all religion.’ But we, for our part, say, after some pains bestowed, that whoever peruses the writings of Servetus without a foregone conclusion that _any one among the various formulated systems of religious doctrine he sees around him is the_ ABSOLUTE TRUTH, _and alone essential to constitute Religiousness_, will not fail to discover that not only had Servetus no thought of putting out the light of religion in the world, but that he was animated by a most earnest desire, through another interpretation of the Records which he, too, looked on as Revelations from God, to set Christianity on another, and, as he believed, a better foundation than it had yet obtained from the labours of Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the Reformers. Servetus was, in truth, but one among the host of Reformers of every shade and colour who made their appearance on the field at the trumpet-call of Luther, and who had but this in common: hostility to the ignorance and immorality of monk and priest, to the pride and lust and abuse of power so conspicuous in Pope and Roman Hierarch. And shall we in these days think of him as impious and irreligious who held that it was less than reasonable to speak of the coeternity of a Father and a Son, taking the words in any common-sense acceptation; and that a single entity could not be conceived as subdivided into three distinct entities or persons, without loss of its essential unity, nor three distinct entities or persons be thought of as amalgamated into one without loss of their several individualities? Who said, moreover, that he believed God to be the all-pervading essence and order of the universe; man to be fitted for his state, each individually answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another, and that faith in the highest exemplar of humanity as he conceived it, that had ever appeared on earth, added to a good life and its associate charities, was that which was required for salvation? Shall we, we ask, think of such a man as less pious, less religious, less likely to be acceptable to God than one who believed that there was a certain Word which was with God from the beginning, and was indeed God, and yet another than God; or that God, beside his