Henry, to his honour, goes yet farther; he does not approve of Calvin’s attempt to detract from the horror and pity we feel for Servetus’ fate, by charging him with cowardice in the face of death. ‘Let us observe in Servetus,’ says the biographer of Calvin, ‘those beautiful traces of the true life which he showed at the last: his regret for former tergiversations, his humility, his constancy, his earnest prayer to God, and his forgiveness of his enemies. Had he but had the truth in his heart he would have died a true martyr; but he must tremble in his death hour, for he had blasphemed the Majesty of God.’ But Servetus did not tremble in his death hour, he never blasphemed the Majesty of God, and he died in charity with all men, even with him who had brought him to his untimely end, and who ten years after the death of his victim had no better title for him than _Chien et meschant Garnement_,--dog and wicked scoundrel! Mosheim, to whom we owe the gathering and preservation of much that is interesting in connection with Servetus, working in the middle of the bygone century, and referring to what Calvin himself avows, viz., ‘that he would not have persevered so resolutely on the capital charge had Servetus been but modest and not rushed madly on his fate,’ exclaims, ‘What an avowal! Servetus, after all, must burn not because he had outraged the word of God, and infected the world with error, but because he had addressed John Calvin in disrespectful language! Calvin’s avowal is truly a hard knot for those to untie who hold that revenge had nothing to do with the death of Servetus. For my own part I am not bound to weigh all the grounds that tell for or against the Reformer, and I am not, perhaps, altogether impartial. I am minded, however, that they are not wholly in the right who say that Calvin proceeded against the unhappy Spaniard led on by hatred and revenge alone; and I am not so certain that they are in the wrong who think it was not mere religious zeal which suggested and carried the tragedy to its conclusion. What is man! The very best often serve God and themselves when they fancy they are serving God alone.’ With these words of the pious historian of the Church we conclude; tempering the severer criticism suggested by the facts as they present themselves, with the more charitable construction of the ecclesiastic. APPENDIX APPENDIX. An account of the extant copies of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio;’ of the reprints of the work by Dr. de Murr and Dr. Mead, and of the notices the work has received in earlier and later times.