At what age Servetus left his convent teachers we are not informed; some time however, we should imagine, before definitive vows are required of the youthful aspirant to the holy office, when aptitude for the prospective vocation is made subject of particular inquiry. Now it may have been that he was discovered to be indifferently qualified by mental constitution to follow further the line of life intended for him--a conclusion to which we are led from all we know of the man in his works. He was pious enough and credulous enough through life; but his religion must be of the kind he thought out for himself, and his beliefs of his own fashioning, not such as could be presented to him ready shaped for acceptance. The very air of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was alive with mutterings of the storm that had long been gathering, and found vent at length through the manly voice of Martin Luther; and when we find hints that fears of the Inquisition had had something to do with Servetus’s subsequent movements, we are disposed to imagine that the call to free thought which had sprung up on the revival of letters and found out the northern Monk in his cell, had also reached the Friar of the south, and from him flowed over upon the receptive mind of his youthful scholar. Be this as it may, when twelve or fourteen years of age, Servetus appears to have entered as a student at the University of Saragossa, then the most celebrated in Spain; and if he had Peter Martyr de Angleria among the number of his teachers, as we are assured he had,[2] he was in the hands of one of the most accomplished as well as liberal-minded men of his age. Angleria was in fact still more distinguished as a scholar, diplomatist, teacher and writer, than as a soldier. Having come to Spain in the suite of one of the Italian embassies to Ferdinand and Isabella, he joined the army of the Catholic king and queen as a volunteer, and having distinguished himself on more than one occasion in the field, he was presented to the sovereigns on the conclusion of hostilities, entered the service of Isabella, in especial, and having taken orders--an indispensable condition to acknowledgment as a teacher--he was engaged by the queen as tutor and general supervisor of the education of the host of young noblemen and gentlemen who thronged the Court. The influence exerted by such a man in such a situation cannot be doubted; and it has been surmised that more than one of the distinguished personages who appeared in Spain, in the early part of the sixteenth century, owed not a little of all that made them notable in after life to their teacher. Angleria was in fact a man in advance of his age, morally, and, we must believe, religiously also--although Spain was not always the devoted slave of Rome we have been accustomed to think her in these our days. He had seen enough in his campaigning and its consequences to disgust him