Turn we to the letters to Calvin, less in view of their theological import--the point from which alone they have hitherto been regarded by the biographers of Servetus--than as calculated to let us into the secret of the misunderstanding and enmity that took such entire possession of the mind of the Genevese Reformer. In Servetus’s style of address, as we have said, we at once note an entire absence of the obsequiousness to which Calvin was accustomed. Far from approaching the Reformer as a Gamaliel at whose feet he was to kneel and take lessons, Servetus assumes the part, not merely of the equal, but often of the superior, and is by no means nice in the terms in which he challenges the points he holds erroneous in the doctrines of the great man he is addressing. In the very first of the thirty epistles he wrote, whilst stating an opinion which he knew Calvin must think heretical or even blasphemous, he ‘desires him to remember--_memineris quæso_, &c.--that the Man, Jesus Christ, was truly begotten of the substance of God;’ and in the second of the series informs him quite bluntly that he is mistaken in his interpretation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He even attempts to fix him on the horns of a dilemma by showing that Calvin’s view, if accepted, would lead to the assumption not of one Son of God, but of three Sons of God. ‘But all such tritheistic notions,’ he continues, ‘are illusions of Satan, and they who acknowledge the Trinity of the Beast (i.e. of Papal Christianity) are possessed by three spirits of demons. False are all the invisible Gods of the Trinitarians, as false as the gods of the Babylonians. Farewell!’ This at the outset is certainly not very respectful from the physician of Vienne to the Spiritual Dictator of Geneva! The third epistle commences in the same easy style: ‘_Sæpius te monui_--I have repeatedly admonished you.’ It is on the way in which he imagines Christ to have been engendered by God, and so to be truly and naturally His Son; adding that he has always taught the eternity of the Divine Reason, styled The Word, as prefiguring Christ, in whose face at the Incarnation, he says, Man first verily saw the face of God. ‘You are offended with me,’ he proceeds, ‘for speaking as I do of the human form of Christ; but have patience and I shall lead you up to my conclusion--_te manducam_,’ etc. Fancy John Calvin feeling himself taken in hand by Michael Servetus!