The ‘great volume full of ravings,’ spoken of in the letter to Farel, must have been a MS. copy of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ already written, but not perhaps finally revised. Upon this work it does not appear that Calvin ever condescended to offer any strictures; although it was doubtless accompanied by a letter--not printed among the thirty--requesting an opinion on its merits. But even as he never had anything of the kind, neither, although repeatedly asked for, both directly and through others, as we learn, could Servetus ever get back his manuscript. Whether retained in mere contempt, or as evidence against the writer, with occasion presenting, as has been surmised, we do not know; but certain it is that Calvin remained persistently deaf to all the writer’s entreaties to have his work returned to him. If not purposely retained in view of the contingency hinted at, it was eventually used in such wise; for it was among the Documents furnished by Calvin through Trie to the authorities of Vienne with the immediate effect of bringing about the arrest of its writer and imperilling his life.
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!