It should not be inferred that these Anabaptist heretics are to be closely identified with Unitarianism, in the modern sense of that term. For while it is true that they were all more or less unsound as to the Trinity and their views of Christ, yet they were also all more or less full of vagaries with which Unitarians have had little sympathy. Moreover, the two are radically different as to temper of mind. The Anabaptists were in their religious temperament mystics, relying implicitly upon, some inner light for religious guidance, and were therefore always in danger of running into fanaticism; whereas Unitarianism has throughout its history been marked by its faith in the calmer guidance of reason, and if sometimes cold, has at all events always remained sane.

The important point to note about the Anabaptists in connection with this history is that these radicals of the early Reformation, springing from widely separated places in Protestant Europe, bear witness to a widespread dissatisfaction with the Catholic doctrines about God and Christ, and illustrate many different attempts (for no two of them thought alike) to arrive at beliefs more in harmony with Scripture, and more acceptable to reason, than were the doctrines of the creeds. Having to bear, however, the double weight of heresy and fanaticism, they were foredoomed to failure. Unitarian thought had to wait for saner teachers, more sober leaders, and freer laws, before it could become organized and hope to spread. If this tendency of thought was thus crushed in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, the liberalizing influence of the Anabaptist movement had meanwhile spread to other lands; and we shall later see how in Italy, Poland, England, and even in Holland itself, it was among Anabaptists that Unitarian thought first arose.

Meantime what the development of a more liberal theology most needed was a spokesman, who was not handicapped from the start by association with a discredited movement, and who, instead of joining his attacks upon the doctrine of the Trinity with various other speculations, should win more pointed attention by concentrating his attacks upon that doctrine alone. Such a leader appeared in the person of Servetus, to whom we must next turn.

CHAPTER VIII

MICHAEL SERVETUS: EARLY LIFE, 1511-1532

In a previous chapter we saw that the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, noting the fact that the teaching of the Catholic Creeds as to the Trinity and the two natures in Christ was not to be found in Scripture, seemed at first half inclined, if not quite yet to deny those doctrines outright, at all events to pass them by without emphasis, as doctrines not necessary to salvation. We next saw how some of the Anabaptist leaders who were so bold as to deny those doctrines, brought their own views on these matters into the greater disrepute through the extravagance of their movement in other directions. Now if the case had been dropped here, it might have been long before Antitrinitarian views would have asserted themselves in Protestantism; but we have now to turn to a man who arose just when the Anabaptist heretics had been pretty well put to silence, and forced the question upon the attention of the Reformers more insistently and sharply than ever. This man was a Spanish Catholic named Michael Servetus.1 He was in more than one respect one of the most remarkable men of the sixteenth century; while the tragic death which he suffered made him the first and most conspicuous martyr to the faith whose history we are following.

1 This is the Latin form of his name, and the one commonly used. His full name in its correct Spanish form was Miguel Serveto alias Reves. Other forms often met with rest upon error or mistaken conjecture.

Though our records of the life of Servetus are scanty and inconsistent, and the gaps in them have often been filled up by conjectures which have later proved to be mistaken, it seems most likely that he was born in 1511 at Tudela, a small city in Navarre, and that in his infancy his parents removed to Villanueva in Aragon, where his father had received an appointment as royal Notary, an office of some distinction, and where the family lived in handsome style. His parents were devoted Catholics, and it is thought that he may at first have been designed for the priesthood. Little is known to a certainty about his early education, but he seems to have been a precocious youth, and early in his teens to have acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and to have become well versed in mathematics and the scholastic philosophy.

There was much going on in Spain at this period to make a serious-minded youth thoughtful about questions of religion. Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic were on the throne, determined to secure political unity in their new nation by compelling religious uniformity; and a spirit of the most intolerant orthodoxy controlled the government. In 1492, for refusing to deny the faith of their fathers and profess Christianity, 800,000 Jews had been banished from the kingdom. In the same year the Moors had been overthrown in Granada, and although for a few years they were granted toleration, they were soon compelled to choose between abandoning their Mohammedanism and being driven from Spain. In both cases it was the dogma of the Trinity that proved the insurmountable obstacle for races which held as the first article of their faith the undivided unity of God. Within the generation including Servetus's boyhood, some 20,000 victims, Jewish or Mohammedan, were thus burned at the stake. Despite the resistance of the

liberty-loving Aragonians, the Inquisition was set up among them to root out heresy; and these things must all have made a deep impression upon the mind of the young Servetus, and may well have laid the foundation for the main passion of his life.

Whatever may have been intended for him before, when Servetus was seventeen his father determined that he should enter the law, and to that end sent him across the Pyrenees to the University of Toulouse, then the most celebrated in France. Here he made a most wonderful discovery. For the first time in his life he found a Bible to read.1 He simply devoured it. It seemed to him as though it were a book fallen into his hands from heaven, containing the sum of all philosophy and all science, and it made upon him a profound impression which lasted as long as he lived. For hitherto he had been taught to believe that the dogma of the Trinity was the very center of the Christian religion, and he knew that for refusing to accept it thousands in his own land had recently been put to death. Despite all this, the doctrine as taught in the schools had seemed to him but a dead thing, yielding no inspiration for his religious life, and used chiefly as a subject of hair-splitting debates between scholastic theologians. Now to his surprise and infinite relief he found in the Bible nothing of all this, but instead the most wonderful religious book in all the world, full of life, and revealing to him as a vivid reality the great, loving heart of Christ. The more he read it, the more he was inspired by it, and the more he became convinced that not only for Jews and Mohammedans but for all men the doctrine of the Trinity as then

1 Luther also at the age of eighteen saw a Bible for the first time at the University of Erfurt, and left the study of the law for the service of the Church.