Note 59 — Chapter XVII

It is a capital mistake to suppose, as Mosheim and others have done, that the Christianismi Restitutio was ever exposed for sale, or readily to be had either at Geneva or elsewhere. It cannot be shown that more than four or five copies at most of the book ever left the bales in which the whole impression was packed. There was, first, the copy sent, as I venture to think, by Servetus through Frelon to Calvin, which led to the arrest and trial at Vienne. Second, the copy taken from the five bales seized at Lyons for the use of the Inquisitor Ory. Third, the copy transmitted for their inspection to the Swiss Churches and Councils. Fourth, the copy given to Colladon by way of Brief by Calvin, with the passages underscored, on which Servetus was finally arraigned and condemned. And Fifth, the copy which we find Calvin sending to Bullinger at his request. Of these copies one may even have served two ends: after making the round of the Churches and coming again into Calvin’s hands, it may very well have been that which he despatched to Bullinger. That the book was not to be had immediately after the execution of Servetus is proved conclusively by what Sebastian Castellio, the accredited author of the work entitled, Contra Libellum Calvini, says on the subject: He had not been able to obtain a sight of Servetus’s book, so as to inform himself of what he writes, Calvin having taken such pains to have it burned—‘cum Serveti libros, quippe combustos diligentia Calvini, non habeam, ut ex iis possem videre quid scriberet.’ The Christianismi Restitutio, in fact, remained completely unknown in the Republic of Letters until its existence was proclaimed by Wotton in his Reflections on Learning, Ancient and Modern, in the year 1694 (all but a century and a half after the death of its author), by the publication of the passage on the pulmonary circulation, extracted, we must conclude, from the copy that was then in England, and subsequently became, if it were not already, the property of Dr. Meade—the identical copy with the name on the title-page of Germain Colladon, the advocate who prosecuted Servetus at the instance of Calvin, now in the national library of Paris.