Accompanied by two of the Councillors, Calvin entered the prison an hour or two before noon of the fateful October 27, 1553, and prefacing the account he has left us of what transpired at the meeting, by saying that Servetus had received the notice of his sentence and impending doom with a ‘sort of brutish stupidity--_cum belluina stupiditate_,’ he proceeds: ‘I asked him what he wanted with me--_quidnam vellet?_ To which he replied, that he desired to ask my pardon.’ I then said that I had never prosecuted anyone on merely personal grounds; that I had admonished him with all the gentleness I could command as many as sixteen years ago, and not without danger to my own life had spared no pains to cure him of his errors. But all in vain! my expostulations appeared rather to excite his bile. Quitting speech of myself, however, I then desired him rather to ask pardon of the Eternal God, towards whom he had shown himself but too contumelious, presuming, as he had done, to take from his Essence the three hypostases that pertain to it; and saying that were it possible to show a personal distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we should have a three-headed Cerberus for a God; with much beside that need not now be repeated. Seeing, ere long, that all I said went for nothing, and feeling indisposed to trespass on the time of the Magistrates, or to appear something more than my Master, in obedience to the precept of Paul, I took my leave of the heretic, αὐτοκατάκριτος--self-condemned.[99]