In sequence to this, our author goes on to say that ‘he will not make use of the word Trinity, which is not to be found in Scripture, and only seems to perpetuate philosophical error. It were well, indeed,’ he continues, ‘that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men’ (Ib. f. 64, b.); words in which we see reason getting the better of subserviency to the letter of Scripture, and putting an extinguisher, as it were, upon his own as well as other vain attempts to give a rational explanation of the mystical Neo-Platonic Logos-Doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, of which the Trinitarian Church-Dogma is the outcome. Hampered, however, by the idea that everything in the Bible is the word of God, Servetus insists on trying to find, for himself and his readers, something like an acceptable interpretation of the leading words of the Imaginative Mystical Discourse entitled the Gospel according to John. In this he fails, as might have been anticipated; and then, his eyes being opened to the fact, he has nothing for it but to conclude that the orthodox Trinitarian mystery were well discarded from the thoughts and the beliefs of man. ‘To believe, however,’ he continues, ‘suffices, it is said; but what folly to believe aught that cannot be understood, that is impossible in the nature of things, and that may even be looked on as blasphemous! Can it be that mere confusion of mind is to be assumed as an adequate object of faith?’ (Ib. f. 33, b.) The Trinitarian doctrine of dogmatic Christianity Servetus held to have been a great obstacle to the spread of the religion of Christ. Opposed to the conception of the Oneness of Deity to which the Jews had finally attained, the religious system in which it was made so prominent an element, could not possibly be accepted by them; neither, on the same ground, could it be received by Islam; for Mahomet, whilst he acknowledged Jesus as a prophet and power in the world, born of a Virgin, too, like other distinguished individuals, in some incomprehensible manner, never for a moment thought of him as the Son of God; for ‘God,’ says he, ‘as he is not engendered, so neither does he engender.’ But it is not in connexion with the subject of the Trinity alone that Servetus shows the advances he had made on his age in the sphere of Biblical exposition. Commenting on the text, ‘No man hath ascended up to heaven but he who came down from heaven’ (John iii. 13), he says: ‘It is the spiritual heaven that is here to be understood, and this exists wherever Christ is; “to ascend to heaven” means no more than to discourse of heavenly things. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” says the text (Ib. xiv. 9), i.e., says our expositor, ‘he who appreciates the priceless treasures of Christ’s love easily attains to a knowledge of God the Father. But how should an invisible, intangible Word give us to know God?’ (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 46 _et seq._)