Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/283

 after a vainly heroic defence, he was burned to death (with peculiarly cruel torment) at Champel, on October 26, 1553. A noble homosexualism characterized Servetus. Intellectually he was a sort of universal genius, far beyond his theological dialectics. His medical learning was immense for his time; his discovery of the circulation of the blood (an honour to him far in advance of later claimants) gives him ever a high place. He-was also a brilliant geographer, physicist, astrologer, mathematician, botanist, and much else; all before his middle years.

Another brilliant religious light in the early history of Calvinism, the much prized Beza, is accused circumstantially of being Urananian; as by his own confession withal. Beza (1510-1105) was born Théodore de Béze, at Vézelay, in Burgundy. After lively secular years in Paris, having decided on the profession of religion, he passed from Catholicism to a strongly Calvinistic theology; becoming a distinguished factor of the Reformation. Two intimate friendships, one with a certain "Pomponius" and another with a remarkably beautiful youth named Audebert, were of so passional a nature, according to Beza's descriptions in his Latin poems (the indiscreet "Juvenilia") that classic language need not be much more confessional. Much was made of this when Beza apostatized. Fierce and many were the attacks on his sexual morals. Franz Balduin, F. Claudius de Xaintes, Jerome Bolsec, Coccius, Bisselius, Maimbourg, Baillet, in the course of the XVII Century, and in the XVIII the polemist Daniel, virulently proclaimed Beza not only a vile heretic, but a sodomite. One cannot get help admitting the basis of uranian accusations when we glance at Beza's verse. The fact that in later life he was twice married of course does not negative his early memoranda as to "the beautiful Audebert, and the beloved Pomponius". The lament for Pomponius included in the "Juvenilia" says, for instance: