The letters of Villeneuve to Calvin, or a certain number of them, at all events, have been transmitted to us by their writer in a section of his work on the Restoration of Christianity; and we turned to them with the interest of expectation, thinking we might there find a key to the singular and persistent hostility with which Calvin shows himself to have been animated towards his correspondent. Nor were we disappointed. The style of address indulged in by Villeneuve, as the correspondence proceeds, is as if purposely calculated to wound, if not even to insult, a man in the position of John Calvin, conscious of his own superiority, jealous of his authority, and become so sensitive to everything like disrespectful bearing on the part of those who approached him. But of deference or respect, save at the outset, there is not a trace in any of the letters of Villeneuve. On the contrary, they have often an air of something like familiarity that must have been extremely disagreeable to Calvin. Add to this the unseemly and disparaging epithets with which he pelts the irritable Reformer, and we have warrant enough for our assumption that, mainly out of this unfortunate epistolary encounter, was the enmity engendered which took such hold of Calvin’s mind as led him to see in a mere theological dissident a dangerous innovator and deadly personal foe. The correspondence at the outset, however, had nothing of the unseemly character it acquired as it proceeded. Villeneuve approached the Reformer at first as one seeking aid and information from another presumed most capable of giving both; and this was precisely the style of address that suited Calvin. The subjects on which he desired the Reformer’s opinion were theological, of course, and of great gravity, involving topics of no less moment than the sense in which the Divinity and Sonship of Christ, the Doctrine of Regeneration, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, were to be understood. In a letter to a friend of a later date Calvin speaks as if he believed that these questions had been proposed in mockery, or to get him into difficulty; but this was an afterthought, and when he had come to persuade himself that Servetus was a man devoid of all religious principle. Nothing of any suspicion of the kind he hints at appears in his reply to the first communication he received, for it is sober, earnest, and to the point, each subject being taken up in succession and discussed, now in conformity with his own particular views, and then with the interpretation of the Churches. Servetus’s questions to Calvin, three in number, were propounded categorically, and in the following order:-- 1st.--Was the man Jesus, who was crucified, the Son of God; and what is the rationale of the Sonship (filiatio)? 2nd.--Is the Kingdom of heaven in man; when is it entered; and when is regeneration effected?