The principal leaders, indeed, of the reforming party professed to retain, unchanged, the views of the Athanasian Trinity maintained by the Church of Rome; and it would even seem as if the very extent to which they had deviated from the standard of Popery in other directions only increased their solicitude to preserve themselves free from the imputation of heresy on this point. They were thus induced to display, in their treatment of those who had only followed out the genuine principles of Protestantism to a greater extent and with more consistency than themselves, a more than ordinary portion of that persecuting intolerant spirit which, in the language of a distinguished historian, is ‘the deadly original sin of the reformed churches; that which cools every honest man's zeal for their cause, in proportion as his reading becomes more extensive.’1
The unhappy fate of Servetus is the foulest blot in the history of Calvin. But before his time there was no small number who openly professed the Unitarian doctrine, and among them some of high reputation for talents and learning.
Of the Italian confessors whose names impart a peculiar lustre to the early history of the reformation, not a few are well known to have rejected
