But the St. Bartholomew and all the nameless horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of religion and to uphold what is called the honour of God, are the logical outcome of principles that lead to such language. Calvin’s treatment of Servetus was in truth nothing less than a direct encouragement to the Roman Catholics of France to persevere in their atrocities towards the Protestants. Geneva, which had been looked on as the bulwark of independent thought and of freedom to worship God according to conscience came to be regarded as the seat of another Inquisition. All and sundry who pretended to think for themselves, and who did not include Election and Predestination in their creed, must be silent. Did they speak or say a word against the rules and regulations of the modern propounder of the doctrine of God’s partiality, they were mercilessly hunted down, fined, imprisoned, scourged on the back, branded on the cheek, banished from their homes, or, as in the case of Servetus, put to death; even as the moving cause of all these atrocities would himself have been dealt with in France had he there avowed what were there styled the heretical opinions he entertained--the damnable doctrines he taught. Persecution which follows necessarily from the principles on which the Church of Rome is founded, could not be entered on by the Reformed Churches without a total abnegation of those to which they owe their existence.[109] But it is not with Servetus’s doctrines alone that Calvin occupies himself in his ‘Declaration’ and ‘Defence.’ He must further darken the fame of the man whom he slew, for the consistency and fortitude he displayed when confronted with death, as we have seen him essaying to detract from the purity and probity of his life on his trial. ‘Servetus,’ says Calvin, ‘was only bold when he had no fear of punishment before him; but so overwhelmed was he in face of his impending fate, that he was lost to all and everything about him. Praying with the people he had said were Godless, he yet prayed as if he had been in the midst of the Church of God, and thereby showed that his opinions were nothing to him! Giving no sign of regret or repentance, saying never a word in vindication of his doctrines, what, I ask you, is to be thought of the man who, at such a time, and with full liberty to speak, made no confession one way or another, any more than if he had been a stock or a stone? He had no fear of having his tongue torn out; he was not forbidden to say what he liked; and though at last he declined to call on Jesus as the eternal Son of God (Calvin omits to say that he called devoutly with his latest breath on Jesus as Son of the eternal God), inasmuch as he made no declaration of his faith, who shall say that this man died a martyr’s death?’ ‘Theological hatred,’ says a late esteemed writer,[110] ‘never inspired words more atrociously cruel and unjust than these of Calvin;’ and we do not hesitate to indorse the dictum.