he satisfied himself and dared to say to the world that some of the fundamentals of Christianity as formulated by the Church of Rome, and acquiesced in by the Reformers of Germany, had no warrant in the teaching of the Prophet of Nazareth. Rejecting, as he did, the whole of the post-apostolic dogmatic accretions of the Church of Rome, Servetus is the source of the more ‘reasonable service’ we are now permitted to render, and--strange conjunction!--through his disastrous intercourse with Calvin, in no small measure the original of the free enquiry that is leading on to conclusions yet uncontemplated as to man’s relations to the Unseen and the Eternal. The life and labours of the man of whom so much may be said can never be otherwise than interesting to the world. Nor is it in his life only that Servetus has been influential. His death has, perhaps, been even more influential than his life; for when his pyre began to blaze, the beacon was lighted that first warned effectually from the shoals of bigotry and intolerance on which religion misunderstood has made shipwreck so long. The custom of consigning heretics, as dissidents in their interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures were called, to death by fire then began to fall into abeyance; princes and chief magistrates ceased from assisting at autos-da-fé as edifying spectacles; and persecution to less terrible conclusions--imprisonment, banishment, fine, and social ostracism--has been coming gradually, however slowly, to an end. We have more than one book in English purporting to give an account of the life of Servetus, but none, I think, that is not either a compilation at second hand, or a translation wholly or in principal part from the French. No one among us appears to have referred to the works of Servetus and his contemporaries for the information that would have enabled him to give something like a true presentment of the man as he lived and died. To do this--to make the English reader acquainted with another of the great devoted men who have toiled on life’s pilgrimage with bleeding feet, to smooth and make straight the way for others, healers in the strife and in front of the battle, not to strike but to staunch the wounds that men in their ignorance and madness make on one another--such is the purpose of the work now presented to the reader. In appealing mainly to the original sources of information on the life of Servetus, I have still not failed to make myself master of what has been done in later days by others in this direction. The references that occur in the course of my book to the writings of La Roche, Allwörden, Mosheim, D’Artigny, Trechsel, Rilliet, and, last but not least, of Henry Tollin, make it unnecessary for me to do more in this place than to acknowledge my obligations to them.