little yourself of speaking of the Holy Spirit as an angel, but think it a great crime in me when I say that the Son of God was a man. 'Farewell. MICHAEL SERVETO.' 1 This letter, so characteristic of the writer, is full of interest even at the present hour. Servetus would have Ecolampadius instruct him; but the invariable complaint of all with whom he came in contact was that he could never be made to receive instruction; in other words, secure in his own conclusions, he thought his would-be instructors mistaken in theirs. And this, indeed, for good or ill, is characteristic of all who impress their age, and show themselves leaders in art, in science, in policy, or religion. Genius measures with its own rod, and is its own guide on the way it goes. The world is not moved by men who have all they own from teachers. But especially worthy of note is the remark our writer makes on the serious responsibility men assume when they put each other to death for mistaken interpretations of Scripture. Had no scholar in modern times before Servetus come to so great and charitable a conclusion, we should still have to hallow the memory of the man who, more than three hundred years ago, had the head and the heart to proclaim 1 Epistolæ ab Ecclesia Helvetica Reformatoribus, a Jo. Fueselino edita. 8vo. Tigur., 1742. so great a principle, in the enforcement of which in all its aspects the better spirits of the world still find such opposition; though it is not now by the infliction of death that bigotry and intolerance revenge themselves on their victims, the advocates of freethought and outspoken religious criticism. A good deal has been said, by its author as well as others, of the crude style of the book on Trinitarian Error. But this to us seems the least of its faultsthe language is generally simple enough, not Ciceronian certainly, but the meaning, save where the writer probably did not quite understand himself, is not doubtful. As a composition, it is the arrangement that is most defective. The parts have so little either of coherence or sequence, that of the seven books or chapters into which it is divided, the last, as it seems, might advantageously have been made the first. For there it is, and not until the penultimate page of the entire treatise is attained, that the key to the writer's most important conclusions is discovered. Two fundamental rules or principles,' he says, ' are to be steadily | kept in view -1st, That the nature of God cannot be conceived as divisible; and 2nd, That that which is accidental to the nature of anything is disposition.' The corollary he would have to follow from these premisses or postulates being, that the orthodox idea of a Trinity, i.e., of the existence of three distinct persons or entities in the unity of the Godhead, is an impossibility, and so a fundamental religious error. As 6 Servetus himself believed in God, and acknowledged a Son of God and a Holy Spirit-finding mention of these in the Scriptures, no word of which would he overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say—he held that the Son and Holy Ghost, in consonance with his Second Principle, must be what he calls dispositions, or dispensations of the one eternal indivisible Deity-in other words, manifestations of God in the world. The Idea of God' to which Servetus had attained is unquestionably grand. 'God,' he says, 'is eternal, one and indivisible, and in himself inscrutable, but making his being known in and through creation; so that not only is every living, but every lifeless thing, an aspect of the Deity. Before creation was, God was; but neither was he Light, nor Word, nor Spirit, but some ineffable thing else—sed quid aliud ineffabile these, Light, Word, Spirit, being mere dispensations, modes or expressions of pre-existing Deity. (Dial.' i. 4.) God, he says, has no proper nature; for this would imply a beginning; and before and after are terms that have no significance when they are referred to God. Though God knew what to man would be a future, his own prescience was without respect to time, and involved no such necessity as is implied in choice. God, he continues, can be defined by nothing that pertains to body; he created the world of himself, of his substance, and, as essence, he actuates-essentiat-all things. (Dial.' ii.) The Spirit of God is the universal agent; it is in the air we breathe, and is the very breath of life; it moves the heavenly bodies; sends out the winds from their quarters; takes up and stores the water in the clouds, and pours it out as rain to fertilise the earth. God is therefore ever distinct from the universe of things, and when we speak of the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we but speak of the presence and power of God projected into creation, animating and actuating all that therein is, man more especially than aught else; 'the Holy Spirit | I always say is the motion of God in the soul of man, and that out of man there cannot properly be said to be any Holy Spirit.' (De Trin. Err.' f. 85, b, and 'Dial.' ii.) This is obviously a statement of what may be called the Exo-pantheistic principle in very broad terms, akin to what we find in the Grecian mythology and certain schools of philosophy; other than the Endo-pantheistic conception of later times-the Causa Principio et Uno of Giordano Bruno,' the Substantia of Spinoza, the Universum or Kosmos of Goethe,2 to 1 E noi non cercano la Divinità fuor del Infinito Mondo e le Infinite Cose, ma dentro questo et in quelle' (1585). Opere di Giordano Bruno, da Dottore Adolpho Wagner, i. 275. Lips. 1830. 2 Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale : Sie ist das All mit einem Male.' Nor core nor husk in nature see: Im Innern ist ein Universum auch ; Er Gott-ja seinen Gott-benennet.-Goethe. Which may be rendered somewhat literally thus: Hegel, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, D. F. Strauss,1 &c. It is the Principle inseparable from the mighty All as from the individual Atom, or Pantheism proper. We shall, by-and-by, find our author, on his Geneva trial, damaging his case and exciting, we may imagine, the astonishment of the unlettered among his judges, by the assertion of his pantheistic notions, and arousing the needless, and it may even be, the assumed ire of Calvin-for he was familiar with the idea, having said himself that he only objected to call Nature, God, because it was a hard and improper expression-quia est dura et impropria loquutio.2 Criticising the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: 'In Within there is an Universum too; Whence the folks' custom, good and true, That each the Best he knows of all, He God-his God, indeed-doth call. 1 'Der alte und der neue Glaube.' All Theists agree in this: that God is One, Changeless, and Eternal. But God without the Universe would not be the same as God with the Universe; whence the conclusion that God and the Universe can only be conceived of as correlatives. Seeing the impossibility of dissevering Property from the Object in which it inheres, the modern philosopher discards hypothetical agencies, under the name of Spirits, of every kind; from the all-pervading force that keeps suns and planets in their spheres, to such special agencies as those of brain and nerve. Servetus, we have seen, had himself got the length of saying that out of man there was no Holy Spirit. 2 To Calvin God was no other than the Immanent Pantheistic principle of Modern Philosophy: Ubique diffusus, omnia sustinet, vegetat et vivificat in cœlo et in terra-everywhere diffused, he gives life and growth and continuance to all things in heaven and earth.' These are his words. He then goes on to say: 'Fateor quidem pie hoc posse dici, modo a pio animo proficiscatur, Naturam esse Deum-I own, indeed, that provided we speak reverently it may be said that Nature is God? As this would be a 'hard and inappropriate expression,' however, and as in using it 'God is confounded with his works,' he thinks it is objectionable. Institut. Religionis Christianæ, I. iv. 14, and I. v. 5 of an early edition. |