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

625
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
His style is frequently obscure, inelegant, abrupt, diffuse, and repetitious.
He accumulates arguments to an extent that destroys their effect. He gives
eight arguments to prove that the saints in heaven pray for us; ten
arguments to show that Melanchthon and his friends were sorcerers,
blinded by the devil; twenty arguments against infant baptism; twenty-five
reasons for the necessity of faith before baptism; and sixty signs of the
apocalyptic beast and the reign of Antichrist. f1201
In thought and style he was the opposite of the clear-headed, wellbalanced,
methodical, logical, and thoroughly sound Calvin, who never
leaves the reader in doubt as to his meaning.
The moral character of Servetus was free from immorality of which his
enemies at first suspected him in the common opinion of the close
connection of heresy with vice. But he was vain, proud, defiant,
quarrelsome, revengeful, irreverent in the use of language, deceitful, and
mendacious. He abused popery and the Reformers with unreasonable
violence. He conformed for years to the Catholic ritual which he despised
as idolatrous. He defended his attendance upon mass by Paul’s example in
visiting the temple (Acts 21:26), but afterwards confessed at Geneva that
he had acted under compulsion and sinned from fear of death. He
concealed or denied on oath facts which he had afterwards to admit. f1202
At Vienne he tried to lie himself out of danger, and escaped; in Geneva he
defied his antagonist and did his best, with the aid of the Libertines in the
Council, to ruin him.
The severest charge against him is blasphemy. Bullinger remarked to a Pole
that if Satan himself should come out of hell, he could use no more
blasphemous language against the Trinity than this Spaniard; and Peter
Martyr, who was present, assented and said that such a living son of the
devil ought not to be tolerated anywhere. We cannot even now read some
of his sentences against the doctrine of the Trinity without a shudder.
Servetus lacked reverence and a decent regard for the most sacred feelings
and convictions of those who differed from him. But there was a
misunderstanding on both sides. He did not mean to blaspheme the true
God in whom he believed himself, but only the three false and imaginary
gods, as he wrongly conceived them to be, while to all orthodox Christians