the Diet of Augsburg, which closely followed it. Servetus was in sympathy with the Reformers of the Lutheran Reformation, and, in fact, came into conflict with them, because he did not think they were sufficiently rational and thorough-going, and what he saw of the pomp and tyranny of princes and bishops was not calculated to quiet the spirit of protest that early took a powerful hold upon his mind. At the age of twenty he writes: "For my own part. I neither agree nor disagree in every particular with either Catholics or Reformers. It would be easy enough, indeed, to judge dispassionately of everything, were we but suffered without molestation by the churches freely to speak our minds; the older exponents of doctrine, in obedience to the recommendation of St. Paul, giving place to younger men, and these, in their turn, making way for teachers of the clay, who had aught to impart that has been revealed to them. But our doctors now contend for nothing but power. The Lord confound all tyrants of the Church! Amen."
With such views, and a constitutional temperament that knew no fear, and led him to the free expression of his opinions, he was, of course, soon dismissed from the service of Quintana. He then threw himself, body and soul, into the study of theology, and in 1530 we find him at Basle, Switzerland, disputing with Œcolampadius and other theologians on the consubstantiality and coeternity of the Son with the Father, and other points in connection with the idea of the Trinity then prevailing among Catholics as well as Reformers. Being unable to make his views acceptable to the Reformer of Basle, he proceeded to Strasburg to propound his docrines to Martin Bucer and W. F. Capito, but with no better results. Meanwhile, he had not been otherwise idle; he had written a book in which his new opinions concerning Christianity were fully explained, and he resolved upon having it printed, to make the world judge between him and the other Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined, and among men who had thought freely: why should he not avail himself of the same right? The names of Luther, Calvin, etc., appeared on the title-pages of their works: why should his name be withheld from the world? Accordingly, the "Seven Books on Mistaken Conceptions of the Trinity" appeared with the author's full family name, and the name of the country that called him son.
As he appears in this book, Servetus may be considered as the founder of the doctrine of real monotheism, as it was possible to conceive it in the sixteenth century. We are sorry to be unable to give more than a passing notice of the chief points discussed in this work. He believed in a kind of Trinity, but modal and formal, not real and personal in the usual sense of the word. "God cannot be conceived as divisible," he says; he acknowledges a Son of God and a Holy Ghost, finding them in the Scriptures, no word of which he would overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say.
