Informed of the decree of the Court, Calvin tells us that he bestirred himself to have the sentence carried out in the way usual in criminal cases, by beheading with the sword, instead of burning by slow fire. The heretic must be got rid of, he must die, but the Reformer would give a civil rather than an ecclesiastical complexion to the business, and escape imitation of the Roman Catholic cruel mode of putting God’s enemies, as heretics were called, to death. The Council, however, did not enter into his views. The Canon Law, still in force over Europe, condemned the convicted heretic to death by fire, and the majority of the Court determined to abide by the statute as it stood. Bigotry and intolerance, fanned to fever heat, were in the ascendant, and would forego none of their most terrible means of punishing the offender, and striking terror into the vulgar mind. The oblation in such cases provided, would even have appeared to lose its significance, had it been presented otherwise than as ‘a sacrifice of a sweet savour made by fire to the Lord’; for still influenced by the ritual of the old Hebrew Law, which, in earlier days, required the first-born of man and beast for the altar, and had criminals of all sorts ‘hung up before the sun,’ lives forfeited for theological errors, were, in reality, offerings to appease the wrath or win the favour of the Supreme! Servetus, meanwhile, made aware that the trial was at an end, and that nothing more remained for him but to learn his fate, though he may have been alarmed by the additional measures taken for his safe custody, seems not yet, as we have said, to have abandoned the persuasion that he would either be acquitted or subjected to some minor or merely nominal penalty. He was not conscience-stricken; he knew himself guilty of no impiety or intentional blasphemy; his object from first to last had been to present what he thought were higher, truer views of the Revelation which he believed God had made of himself to mankind in the olden time in Judæa; and the proclaimed purpose of his latest work, as he said himself to his Judges, was the _Restoration_, not the destruction of Christianity. More than this: he was not now among Papists bound to intolerance by their creed, but among Protestants in Geneva--the stronghold of free thought and its necessary logical adjunct, toleration; among men who had studied, reasoned, and, like himself, put their own construction on writings which he as well as they believed to be the Word of God. And then, had he not all along been upheld by Perrin and Berthelier, in the belief of triumphing over his persecutor? How should hopes of longer life in view of further effort in the cause that was dear to him, and of freedom to shape out thoughts on matters high and holy, have forsaken him? True, Calvin had aimed at his life through the people of Vienne; and in his present bonds, and all the unworthy usage he suffered, he could not