Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund), so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true. The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser, Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life of Jesus was his man. He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east. Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however, remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his adopted country in the year 1604. These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance. They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future sectarian strife. The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of catechism, confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People were writing them in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Holland and in Denmark. But everywhere these carelessly printed little booklets gave expression to the ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained the real Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty of all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to uphold this one particular form of Truth with a great big capital T to punish with the sword and the gallows and the stake those who willfully remained faithful to a different sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and therefore was of an inferior quality).