The entire ground, indeed, on which the trial had been instituted would not bear close scrutiny. The book, on the presumed publication and dissemination of which it had been set on foot, had not yet been seen in Geneva save by Calvin: there was not then another copy in the city but the one sent, as I believe, by its hapless author through Frelon to the Reformer. Neither had the ostensible institutor of the suit, Nicolas de la Fontaine, the shadow of a grievance against Michael Servetus, the writer of the book. He could never have seen it out of Calvin’s hands, he was almost certainly unacquainted with the language in which it was written, and, if he were not, he could still never have read a word of it but at Calvin’s prompting--he had not, in all probability, even heard the name of Servetus until he had it from the mouth of his master! De la Fontaine, moreover, was no citizen of Geneva any more than Calvin himself[100]--neither of them could have had a legal title to prefer a criminal charge; master and man were aliens alike, and in Geneva on the same plea as Servetus; they fleeing for their lives from the Inquisitors and agents of the concubine of Henry of France, he from the Inquisitor and Church authorities of Dauphiny. More than this. ‘He,’ it is said, ‘who casts the first stone should be himself without sin.’ Calvin pursued Servetus to death mainly on the ground of his divergent interpretation of the Trinitarian mystery. But was Calvin himself quite sound on this head, and was he equally hostile to all who called the dogma in question? We have had him saying that he only objected to speak of God and Nature as signifying the same thing, because of the harshness or impropriety of the expression. But he who so delivers himself identifies God and the Universe, and excludes ideas of personality and subdivision in the essence of the Deity. No wonder, therefore, that Calvin was oftener than once charged with unorthodoxy from the Catholic point of view on the subject of the Trinity. In the Confession of Faith which he formulated for the Church of Geneva in the year 1536, it is certain that neither the word Trinity nor the word Person is to be found;[101] and when challenged at a later period by Caroli, the colleague of Viret at Lausanne, on the matter, he did not so express himself as to satisfy his accuser. In a remarkable note, moreover, ‘On the word Trinity and the word Persons,’ written apparently to meet the surmises suggested by the absence of the sacred vocables from the Confession, Calvin says: