But especially worthy of note is the remark our writer makes on the serious responsibility men assume when they put each other to death for mistaken interpretations of Scripture. Had no scholar in modern times before Servetus come to so great and charitable a conclusion, we should still have to hallow the memory of the man who, more than three hundred years ago, had the head and the heart to proclaim so great a principle, in the enforcement of which in all its aspects the better spirits of the world still find such opposition; though it is not now by the infliction of death that bigotry and intolerance revenge themselves on their victims, the advocates of freethought and outspoken religious criticism. A good deal has been said, by its author as well as others, of the crude style of the book on Trinitarian Error. But this to us seems the least of its faults--the language is generally simple enough, not Ciceronian certainly, but the meaning, save where the writer probably did not quite understand himself, is not doubtful. As a composition, it is the arrangement that is most defective. The parts have so little either of coherence or sequence, that of the seven books or chapters into which it is divided, the last, as it seems, might advantageously have been made the first. For there it is, and not until the penultimate page of the entire treatise is attained, that the key to the writer’s most important conclusions is discovered. ‘Two fundamental rules or principles,’ he says, ‘are to be steadily kept in view:--1st, That the nature of God cannot be conceived as divisible; and 2nd, That that which is accidental to the nature of anything is disposition.’ The corollary he would have to follow from these premisses or postulates being, that the orthodox idea of a Trinity, _i.e._, of the existence of three distinct persons or entities in the unity of the Godhead, is an impossibility, and so a fundamental religious error. As Servetus himself believed in God, and acknowledged a Son of God and a Holy Spirit--finding mention of these in the Scriptures, no word of which would he overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say--he held that the Son and Holy Ghost, in consonance with his Second Principle, must be what he calls _dispositions_, or _dispensations_ of the one eternal indivisible Deity--in other words, manifestations of God in the world.