Calvin, we may imagine, was not likely to think any better of Villanovanus’s annotations than the heads of the Church of Rome; on the contrary, pinning his faith on its text as prophetical in the very strictest sense of the word, any attack on its sufficiency as a ground for dogmatic conclusion was felt by him to be a matter much more serious than by the Church of Rome, which sets its own traditions as equipollent to, where not even of higher authority than, that of the Bible on all matters of faith. To see the Scriptures of the Jews otherwise than as Calvin and the Reformers saw them was, in their eyes, to question the infallible book they had substituted for the infallible Pope so lately abandoned by them. We should therefore expect to meet Calvin, with occasion serving, making a point against our expositor on the ground of the Pagnini; and accordingly we find Servetus’s comments brought up against him in the most marked manner during his Geneva Trial, whilst in the Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye Foye, and the Defensio orthodoxæ Fidei, they are spoken of as impertinences and impieties, the Publisher being said at the same time to have been nothing less than cheated out of the money he paid the editor for his work. ‘Who,’ says Calvin, ‘shall venture to say that it was not thievish in the editor when he took five hundred livres in payment for the vain trifles and impious follies with which he encumbered almost every page of the book?’ (‘Opusc. Theol. Om.’ p. 703). Notwithstanding the great Reformer’s denunciations, however, though we may not agree with Villanovanus in all his conclusions, nor approve of his passing without mention Melchior Novesianus, to whom he was indebted for his text, when we look on the beautiful volume he aided in producing, and think of him as the one man of his age who had independent opinions on the real or possible meaning of the poetical writings of the Hebrew people, consonant as these are in so many respects with the views entertained by the most advanced biblical critics of the present day, we are not disposed to think that he was overpaid. Had the Church dignitaries of Vienne seen the Pagnini Bible of Michael Villanovanus with the same eyes as the hierarchs of Rome, Madrid, and Lyons, the matter he added must needs have seriously compromised him with them. His numerous, excessively free, and highly heterodox interpretations of the Psalms and Prophets, nevertheless, in so far as we have been able to discover, appear to have lost Villeneuve neither countenance nor favour at Vienne, which is not a little extraordinary. CHAPTER XVI. ENGAGEMENT AS EDITOR BY JO. FRELON OF LYONS--CORRESPONDENCE WITH CALVIN.