If overlooked by theologians of the Latin races, the work of our
author appears to have attracted all the more attention from the men
of Teutonic descent who had espoused the cause of the Reformation.
In their ranks in the early period of the sixteenth century the
intelligence of Europe, in so far as the religious question was
concerned, seems to have been concentrated. They took pains to inform
themselves generally on all that was going on in the republic of
letters, and in so much of it very particularly as bore on the subject
they had most at heart. It is among the Swiss and German Reformers
consequently that we find any particular notice taken of Servetus’s
book on Trinitarian Error. They alone show themselves scandalised by
the opinions of its author and his style of expressing them, jealous
too, it might seem, at the intrusion of a mere layman into their
domain--a phenomenon as yet perfectly unheard of, and startled further
by the advances they discovered in the book upon all that they, as
inheritors of apostolic traditions in common with their Roman Catholic
brethren (from whom in matters of Dogma they differed so little),
regarded as the truth. Paul of Tarsus preaching his own independent
gospel to the Gentiles, proclaiming the universality of the fatherhood
of God, the nothingness of Circumcision, and, in opposition to the
whole Levitical code, that all days were alike holy and that it was not
what went into the mouth of a man that defiled him, could scarcely
have been more ominous to the intolerant Nazarene Church of Jerusalem
than was the appearance of this daring innovator upon the religious
stage of Germany. His book, everywhere freely sold in the first
instance, must have been read by everyone of liberal education, though
it became so scarce ere long, denounced and decried as it must have
been universally by the ministers, that twenty years afterwards a copy,
most pressingly wanted, and eagerly sought after, was nowhere to be
found in Switzerland; so effectually had zealotry succeeded in having
it committed to the flames!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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