The protracted trial at an end, the sacrifice made, the Councillors of Geneva seem immediately to have come to their senses, and discovered that they had transgressed the true limits of their authority in condemning to death one who owed them no allegiance, who had been guilty of no crime or misdemeanour whether within the bounds of their jurisdiction or elsewhere, and whose heresies implied no rejection of the Scriptures as the Word of God, or of the teaching of Christ and his Apostles as the means of salvation. Servetus’s heresy amounted to no more than repudiation of what he maintained to be erroneous interpretations of the language of the Gospels, of metaphysical assumptions from heathen philosophies, and mystical procedures unwarranted by a line whether of the Old or the New Testament. They overlooked the fact that the presence of the man among them was due to flight from the fate that waited on all who had the courage of their opinions amid the blood-stained intolerance of Roman Catholicism; that he was only another among the host of refugees--their spiritual Dictator himself not excepted--who now crowded the streets of Geneva; and that, but for the hostile interference of Calvin, he, like so many more, would have been welcomed as ‘a bird escaped from the net of the fowler;’ sheltered had he elected to remain, furthered on his way had he chosen to depart. That thoughts of the kind had taken possession of the Council is proclaimed by the fact of their quashing the indictment preferred by Farel and the Consistory against Geroult, Arnoullet’s foreman, three days after the death of Servetus, on the score of the part he had had in printing the ‘Restitutio Christianismi,’ and concealing the character of its contents from his master. Farel and the clergy in their blind zeal would have persevered in their efforts to have another victim. But the civilians interposed. Enough--more than enough had already been done to satisfy the outer world that the Genevese, if reputed heretics themselves, were no favourers of heresy of another complexion than their own. Left to calm reflection, the Council may well have come to see that they had only lent themselves to theological intolerance, when they imagined they were fulfilling an important part of their magisterial duties.