Your judges will only show themselves hard-hearted contemners of Christ, enemies of the true Church and of its pious doctrine, if they prove insensible to the horrible blasphemies of so wicked a heretic. But I hope God will so order it that they may merit commendation by putting out of the way the man who has so long and so obstinately persevered in his heresies to the perdition of so many! In desiring to have the cruelty of the punishment mitigated, you appear as the friend of him who has been your greatest enemy. There are some, however, who would let heretics be doing--as if there were any difference between the office of the pastor and that of the magistrate! Because the Pope condemns the faithful for the crime of heresy, and hostile judges cause innocent persons to undergo the punishment that should be reserved for blasphemers, it is absurd to conclude that heretics are not to be put to death, in order that the faithful may be preserved. But do you act, I pray, in such a manner as to show that in time to come no one will be suffered to promulgate new doctrines and to throw everything into confusion, as this Servetus has done. For my own part, I have often said that I should be ready to suffer death did I teach aught that was opposed to the true doctrine, and should deem myself deserving of the most terrible tortures did I turn even one from the faith that is in Christ. I would not, therefore, apply to another a different rule. Farel is neither an elegant nor an agreeable, still less a logical, writer; but he is zealous in behalf of the true doctrine--the doctrine, to wit, he holds himself. God, the father of mankind, who sends the rain and the sunshine indifferently on all, has, in the opinion of this poor bigot, by a special dispensation of his providence, led a sincerely pious man, according to his lights, to Geneva, there to be first harshly and ignominiously treated by another sincerely pious man, according to his lights; and finally through the influence he exerts over its clergy and magistracy, to be put to a lingering death by slow fire! Farel never thought of himself, with his ‘True Doctrine,’ as a heretic in the highest degree in the eyes of his neighbours the Roman Catholics of France with _their_ ‘True Doctrine.’