To Servetus, the sentence seems to have been wholly unexpected, and its first effect was crushing. His courage came again, however, and he never appeared to better advantage than in his last hours. He sent for Calvin and begged pardon for any wrong he might have done the Genevan reformer. He asked an easier death, not because he retracted any of his opinions but lest, in the agony of fire, he deny the truths which he championed. He went, in simple dignity, to the place of execution on the hill of Champel, lectured and urged to repent by Farel, who had come to Geneva for the final scene. At the sight of the flaming torch, Servetus could not repress a cry of horror, but his courage was adequate to his extremity. The unskillfulness of the executioner – not any intention, as has been sometimes charged – prolonged his agony. But the last utterance that escaped his blistering lips, as the flames tortured his body, was a prayer expressive, at once, of his Christian hope and of the peculiar interpretation of the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity which he had championed, and for which he died: “Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have pity on me!”
From: Calvin: Revolutionary, Theologian, Pastor by Williston Walker; reprint (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2005), p. 265. Originally published under the title John Calvin: The Organizer of Reformed Protestantism, 1509-1564 (1906).
Williston Walker (1860-1922) was Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
