CALVIN AND SERVETUS

The fate of Servetus has always excited the deepest commiseration. His death was a judicial crime, the rank offence of religious pride, personal hatred, and religious fanaticism. It borrowed from superstition its worst features, and offered necessity the tyrant's plea for its excuse. Every detail of such events is of great interest. For by that immortality of mind which exists for ever as History, or through the agency of those successive causes which still link us to it by their effects, we are never separated from the Past. There is also an eloquence in immaterial things which appeals to the…