These changes have been said to be due to warnings given by friends
to Servetus, on the presumption, probably, that he could hardly have
been living on terms of intimacy with many persons of note, both lay
and clerical, without betraying something of the sceptical element
that distinguished him at the outset of his career, and that got the
mastery of him with such disastrous consequences at last. But we have
no positive intimation that Servetus ever failed to keep his counsel,
or that he was known to a soul in Vienne, save as M. Michel Villeneuve,
the physician. Calvin certainly knew him by no other name in Paris
when they met there in 1534, a date at which we have surmised he had
not yet read the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ and so escaped having his
suspicions aroused through the sameness of the views propounded in that
work, and those expressed by his acquaintance, Villeneuve, that he had
its author, Michael Serveto, alias Revés, bodily before him.
That this was really the case is confirmed by the statement which he
makes on his trial at Vienne, to the effect, that he had only been
challenged by Calvin in the course of their correspondence, begun
as many as fourteen years after the publication of his first book,
with being no other than Servetus. Having read the ‘De Erroribus’
subsequently, Calvin did not fail to discover Michael Serveto under the
cloak of Michael Villanovanus, his correspondent of Vienne, and may
consequently, some time after the year 1546, have written to Cardinal
Tournon, as said by Bolsec,[52] or hinted to a friend in Lyons, that
they had an egregious heretic, the writer of the work on Trinitarian
Error, living among them under an assumed name. But of so much as this
we have no reliable assurance, and even if we had, it could have no
reference to the year 1541, the date of publication of the second
edition of Villanovanus’s ‘Ptolemy.’[53]
CHAPTER XV.
EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI’S LATIN BIBLE, WITH COMMENTARY.
Servetus must have got through a very considerable amount of literary
work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not
being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and
certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to
have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the
second ‘Ptolemy’ seen the light, than we find another handsome volume
in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched
in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant
edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.[54]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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