Servetus and Calvin

A Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the Reformation

Some years ago I was led to make a study of the Life and Writings of Spinoza, and took considerable pains to present the gifted Jew of Amsterdam in such fulness to the English reader as might suffice to convey a passable idea of what one of the great misunderstood and misused among the sons of men was in himself, in his influence on his more immediate friends and surroundings through his presence, and on the world for all time through all his works. This study completed, and leisure from the more active duties of professional life enlarging with increasing years, I bethought me of some other among the sufferers in the holy cause of human progress as means of occupation and improvement. Spinoza led, I might say as matter of course, to Giordano Bruno, with whose writings I was familiar, and who was Spinoza’s master, if he ever had a master. But having, at a former period, undertaken to edit the works of Harvey for the Sydenham Society, and the discovery of the circulation of the blood having become renewed matter of discussion with medical men and others, labourers in the field of general literature, I was turned from Bruno to Servetus, as the first who proclaimed the true way in which the blood from the right reaches the left chambers of the heart by passing through the lungs, and who even hinted at its further course by the arteries to the body at large.

Of Servetus at this time I knew little or nothing, save that he had been burned as a heretic at Geneva by Calvin; and of his works I had seen no more than the extract in which he describes the pulmonary circulation. But meditating a revision and prospective publication of the Life of Harvey, with which I had prefaced my edition of his works, I went in search of further information concerning the ingenious anatomist who had not only outstripped his contemporaries, but his successors, by something like a century in making so important an induction as the Pulmonary Circulation. Nor had I far to go. In the ample stores of the British Museum Library I found a complete mine of Servetus-literature, and with access to the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ as reproduced by a learned physician, Dr. De Murr, and other works of the unfortunate Servetus, I encountered not only the physiologist already known to me, but the philosopher and scholar, the practical physician, freed from the fetters of mediæval routine, the geographer and astronomer, the biblical critic, in days when criticism of the kind, as we understand the term, was unimagined, and, alas for him! the most advanced and tolerant of the Reformers,—that sacred band to which Servetus by indefeasible right belongs. Luther, Calvin, and the rest repudiated the discipline and most of the outward rites and shows of the Roman Catholic Church; but they retained the most abstruse of her creeds...