Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus’s mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a ‘book fallen down from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.’ But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived. In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor, Villanovanus means to be no mere follower in the beaten track, but to take an independent course of his own. ‘They,’ he says, ‘who are ignorant of the Hebrew language and history are only too apt to overlook the historical and literal sense of the sacred Scriptures; the consequence of which is that they vainly and foolishly expend themselves in hunting after recondite and mystical meanings in the text where nothing of the kind exists.’ Before reading the prophets, in particular, he would therefore ‘have every one make himself acquainted not only with the Hebrew tongue, but with Hebrew history; for the prophets, without exception, followed history to the letter, although they also prefigured future events in their writings, led as they were by inspiration to conclusions having reference to the mystery of Christ. The power of the Scriptures, indeed, is of a fertilizing or prolific kind. Under a waning literal sense, they possess a vivifying spirit of renovation. It were, therefore, well that their meaning, apprehended as pointing in one direction, should not be overlooked as also pointing in another; and this the rather, seeing that the historical sense comes out ever the more clearly when the prospective bearing, which has Christ for its object, is kept in view--veiled under types and figures, indeed, and so not seen of the Jews, blinded by their prejudices, but now revealed to us in such wise that we seem to see the very face of our God.’