Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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the lake. His dress and manner, his gold chain and gold rings, excited
attention. On being asked by his host whether he was married, he
answered, like a light-hearted cavalier, that women enough could be found
without marrying. f1163 This frivolous reply provoked suspicion of
immorality, and was made use of at the trial, but unjustly, for a fracture
disabled him for marriage and prevented libertinage. f1164
He remained about a month, and then intended to leave for Zürich. He
asked his host to hire a boat to convey him over the lake some distance
eastward.
But before his departure he attended church, on Sunday, the 13th of
August. He was recognized and arrested by an officer of the police in the
name of the Council. f1165
Calvin was responsible for this arrest, as he frankly and repeatedly
acknowledged. f1166 It was a fatal mistake. Servetus was a stranger and had
committed no offence in Geneva. Calvin ought to have allowed him quietly
to proceed on his intended journey. Why then did he act otherwise?
Certainly not from personal malice, nor other selfish reasons; for he only
increased the difficulty of his critical situation, and ran the risk of his defeat
by the Libertine party then in power. It was an error of judgment. He was
under the false impression that Servetus had just come from Venice, the
headquarters of Italian humanists and sceptics, to propagate his errors in
Geneva, and he considered it his duty to make so dangerous a man
harmless, by bringing him either to conviction and recantation, or to
deserved punishment. He was determined to stand or fall with the principle
of purity of doctrine and discipline. Rilliet justifies the arrest as a necessary
measure of self-defence. “Under pain of abdication,” he says, “Calvin must
do everything rather than suffer by his side in Geneva a man whom he
considered the greatest enemy of the Reformation; and the critical position
in which he saw it in the bosom of the Republic, was one motive more to
remove, if it was possible, the new element of dissolution which the free
sojourn of Servetus would have created … . To tolerate Servetus with
impunity at Geneva would have been for Calvin to exile himself … He had
no alternative. The man whom a Calvinist accusation had caused to be
arrested, tried, and condemned to the flames in France, could not find an
asylum in the city from which that accusation had issued.” f1167