Nor can Calvin have credit given him for religious zeal, as the principal, still less as the sole ground for his prosecution of Servetus. He would condone the Church of Berne for repudiating him who denied the Trinitarian mystery, but could not forgive the Spaniard’s intemperate and disrespectful style of address to himself. In this lay the prime cause of offence to the man, accustomed to have all the world bowing down before him, who was always addressed as ‘_Monsieur_,’ not as ‘_Maître_,’ like the rest of the clergy, and whose appointments, however modest in our eyes, equalled those of a dignitary of the Church in neighbouring lands. One of Nicolas de la Fontaine’s counts against the man he did not even know, but whom he arraigned for life or death, is the objectionable language indulged in towards his pastor; and we have Calvin’s own words against himself when he says that Servetus’s ‘arrogance, not less than his impiety, led to his destruction;’ whilst he elsewhere owns, that ‘had Servetus but been possessed of even a show of modesty he would not have pursued him so determinedly on the capital charge.’ By way of conclusion here, let us observe that Calvin’s fundamental principle of Election by the Grace of God ought to have stayed his hand from all persecution on religious grounds. He is constantly spoken of as a man possessed of a peculiarly logical mind. But if it be by the eternal decrees of God that some are ordained to salvation and some to perdition, how should Servetus or anyone else come between God and his purposes? How should the Elect be prejudiced, or the Reprobate made worse by the act of man? CHAPTER XX. CALVIN DEFENDS HIMSELF. Dissatisfaction with what had been done appears to have become general immediately after the execution of Servetus. It extended beyond the walls of the Council chamber and found wider expression than in the arrest of proceedings against Geroult. Ballads and pasquinades, little complimentary to Calvin and his party, circulated freely, and were all the more persistently spread in private if none dared to utter them in public or sing them in the streets. Calvin himself acknowledges that fear alone of consequences repressed for a time any open expression of abhorrence for the death of Servetus. Certain it is, that before the year was out, save among friends and obsequious followers, the act in which he had taken the prominent part came to be so unfavourably construed that he felt forced to appear as his own apologist, and in justification of his deed to proclaim his victim not only a heretic because of theological dissidence, with which the people of Geneva were familiar enough and not always greatly scandalised, but to hold him up as wholly without religious convictions himself, the open enemy of all religion in others, the conspirator against the moral well-being of the world, and the conscience-stricken craven in face of his impending fate!