result, Reformer John Calvin had him burnt to death as a heretic.
"The case of Servetus, therefore, was but one among many; a little more bitter and relentless than the rest, but springing from the same motives and the result of the same principles. Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian and philosopher of unusual scientific attainments, and with a passionate love of religious study which led him to welcome the Reformation as an opportunity for cleansing Christianity of all its corruptions, and restoring its primitive doctrines. As he reckoned among the corruptions of Christianity, however, the personality of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, and Infant Baptism, he found himself at once an outcast, both from the Catholic church and from the ranks of the Reformers, and an especial object of enmity to Calvin, whose theology Servetus allowed himself to criticize freely. Against such a heretic, Calvin believed that no measures were too severe, or too dishonorable. Learning that Servetus, in 1553, was in retirement in Vienne, under an assumed name, he stooped to the device of warning the Catholic authorities against his heresies, and forwarding confidential letters which Servetus had written him, to serve as evidence to convict him before a Catholic tribunal. Servetus was arrested and confronted by the proof of his guilt; and had he not
escaped from prison, Calvin would have had the delight of using the fires of the Inquisition to burn his own heretics. He escaped however, though to meet no kinder fate, and fled to Switzerland, with the purpose of going to Italy. At Geneva he fell into the hands of Calvin himself, who was not slow in availing himself of the opportunity to crush out the hated heresy. Before Servetus came to Geneva, Calvin wrote to Farel, "Should he come and my authority avail, I will not suffer him to go away alive." He brought him at once to trial on three charges: denial of the Trinity; denial of the Divinity of Christ; pantheism. His nominal accuser was Calvin's private secretary, Nicolas de la Fontaine; and during the progress of the trial, Calvin wrote again to Farel, "I hope that the punishment will be death." His wish was fulfilled, and Servetus was sentenced to be burned. Never, in the annals of the Inquisition, was the death of a heretic surrounded by more horror, or attended by less magnanimity or more vindictiveness on the part of the executioners. The pile was erected on an eminence outside the city. Servetus was bound to the stake by an iron chain, with a heavy cord around his neck, the fagots were of green oak-branches with the leaves still on. So heart-rending were his cries, as the slow fires crept around him, that the bystanders ran for dry wood to cast upon the flames; and after a half-hour of frightful agony, he expired.
When Huss (Jan Hus), upon being tied to the stake, cried out, "Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me," a Roman Catholic historian, in recording the event, added, "We should not forget that the devil has martyrs and infuses into them a false constancy." When Servetus, in being led to the stake, fell upon his knees in prayer, crying, "O God! O God!" Farel shouted to the crowd who looked on, "See what power Satan has when he takes possession of a man. This man is learned, but he is now possessed by the devil." And when Servetus, even at the stake, cried, "Jesus Christ, Son of the Eternal God," and would not say, "eternal Son of God," Calvin was afterwards moved to write, "When, under the hands of the executioner, he refused to call Jesus Christ the eternal son of God, who will say that that was a martyr's death?"
~Edward Henry Hall
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