But all this, though illustrative of one element in the character of the subject of our study, and not to be passed over by us, is of less moment than the insight we gain through the comments--assuredly referable to him alone--into the intellectual side of his nature. In so far as we know, Servetus is nowhere even named as a biblical critic and expositor; yet did he precede by more than a century Spinoza, Astruc, Simon, Eichhorn, and others, founders of the modern school of Scriptural exegesis. The Old Testament texts referred by the writers of the New Testament to events still in the womb of time--to the coming especially of a liberator from their misery for the people of Israel in the shape of an anointed King, the conception of a late epoch in Jewish history--Servetus maintained had individuals in view who were alive and influential when the words were written, although he also admitted that they had a further prophetical or prospective sense of the kind commonly ascribed to them. But he who believed in judicial astrology was not likely to have freed himself from that other still accredited form of superstitious belief which leads mankind, without so much as the aspects of the heavens to guide them, to fancy they can see into futurity. He had not divined, as we have now come to know, that even the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the shape in which they have reached us, date from no more remote an age than that which followed the Babylonian Captivity; that we have the work of two different writers under the name of Isaiah, the second of whom lived during or after the reign of Cyrus; and that the Apocalyptic Book of Daniel was written long after the personages there darkly shadowed forth had lived and died, and the events referred to had come and gone.