Servetus undoubtedly possessed the character of the enthusiast in perfection, and by natural constitution was not only indisposed, but to a certain extent incapable of seeing a question in any light save that in which he set it himself. Bucer, although he became hostile to Servetus in the end, must in fact have been not a little taken with him on their earlier intercourse, when in a letter to a friend he speaks of him as ‘his dear son’--‘filius meus dilectus.’ When not curtly met as the rash innovator and heretic, Servetus was neither the proud nor the impracticable man he appeared to Œcolampadius and Calvin. During his visit to Strasburg, when he was doubtless busy with his ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’--revising, polishing, and seeing it through the press--in a notable modification of the terms in which one of the cardinal points of his doctrine is spoken of in an earlier and in a later passage of the work, Bucer’s kindly counsel, it is presumed, may be detected. Whilst in Book IV. we find these words, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; the Word was the shadow only, Christ was the substance,’ in Book VII. he says, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; but to Christ himself there is ascribed a kind of eternity of engenderment. The things that were under the _Law_ were shadows of the body of Christ.’[17] Whatever the two distinguished Reformers of Strasburg may have said, however--and we can hardly doubt of their having tried to win him to the views that were commonly entertained--he was not stayed for a moment in his purpose of getting into print. Nay--and we know not why the right should be refused him--he seems to have thought himself at as full liberty as the leaders of the great movement then afoot to give his own interpretation of the kind of reform which not the Church only, but its doctrine, required. For such an undertaking he was as well qualified by culture as any of the Reformers--better qualified, in fact, than many among them, as in genius we believe he was surpassed, and in liberality and tolerance approached by none. Servetus, in truth, had started in the reforming race unweighted, and so, and in so far with a better chance of reaching the goal of simple truth than either Luther or Calvin; for though he had received the education of the cloister, he was neither professed monk nor priest; and, without detriment to the piety of his spirit, or his belief in what were held by the world as the oracles of God, he had freed himself from the fetters of necessary assent to the interpretations put upon these, formulated into dogmas, by the Church in which he had been born and bred. Servetus seems never to have had any misgivings about his title to show himself among the number of the Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined; among men who had thought freely, and whom he had been used to hear spoken of by his