Unit. Are there others, calling themselves Trinitarians, who hold essentially the Unitarian doctrine?
Dr. B. Yes. “It is a somewhat curious fact in theology that the class of teachers who protest over the word ‘person,’ declaring that they mean only a threefold distinction, cannot show that there is really a hair's breadth of difference between their doctrine and the doctrine asserted by many of the later Unitarians. They may teach or preach in a very different manner; they probably do: but the theoretic contents of their opinion cannot be distinguished. Thus they say that there is a certain divine person in the man Jesus Christ; but that, when they use the term ‘person,’ they mean, not a person, but a certain indefinite and indefinable distinction. The later Unitarians, meantime, are found asserting that God is present in Christ in a mysterious and peculiar communication of his being; so that he is the living embodiment and express image of God. If, now, the question be raised, ‘Wherein [pg 500] does the indefinable distinction of one differ from the mysterious and peculiar communication of the other?’ or ‘How does it appear that there is any difference?’ there is no living man, I am quite sure, who can invent an answer.” (Ibid. p. 135.)
Unit. Is it not true that both of these views are sometimes held alternately by Trinitarians?
Dr. B. “Probably there is a degree of alternation, or inclining from one side to the other, in this view of Trinity, as the mind struggles, now to embrace one, and now the other, of two incompatible notions. Some persons are more habitually inclined to hold the three; a very much smaller number, to hold the one.” (Ibid. p. 134.)
Unit. But can they not hold the Unity with this Trinity?
Dr. B. “No man can assert three persons, meaning three consciousnesses, wills, and understandings, and still have any intelligent meaning in his mind, when he asserts that they are yet one person. For, as he now uses the term, the very idea of a person is that of an essential, incommunicable monad, bounded by consciousness, and vitalized by self-active will; which being true, he might as well profess to hold that three units are yet one unit. When he does it, his words will, of necessity, be only substitutes for sense.” (Ibid. p. 131.)
(2.) But suppose that the belief of the Church in the Trinity was as universal as Dr. Huntington asserts and Dr. Bushnell denies, what would be its value? His argument proves too much. If it proves the Trinity to be true, it proves, a fortiori, the Roman Catholic Church to be the true Church, and Protestantism to be an error; for Martin Luther, at one time, was the only Protestant in the world. Suppose that a Roman priest had come to him then. He might have addressed him thus:—
“It is certainly an impressive testimony to the truth of the Church of Rome, that the Christian world have been so generally agreed in it. Truth is not determined by majorities; and yet it would be contrary to the laws of our constitution not to be affected by a testimony so vast, uniform, and sacred as that which is rendered by the common belief of Christian history and the Christian centuries to the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. We travel abroad, through these converted lands, over the round world. We enter, at the call of the Sabbath morning light, the place of assembled worshippers; let it be the newly planted conventicle on the edge of the Western forest, or the missionary [pg 501] station at the extremity of the Eastern continent; let it be the collection of Northern mountaineers, or of the dwellers in Southern valleys; let it be in the plain village meeting-house, or in the magnificent cathedrals of the old cities; let it be the crowded congregation of the metropolis, or the ‘two or three’ that meet in faith in upper chambers, in log-huts or under palm-trees; let it be regenerate bands gathered to pray in the islands of the ocean, or thankful circles of believers confessing their dependence and beseeching pardon on ships' decks, in the midst of the ocean. So we pass over the outstretched countries of both hemispheres; and it is well nigh certain—so certain that the rare and scattered exceptions drop out of the broad and general conclusion—that the lowly petitions, the fervent supplications, the hearty confessions, the eager thanksgivings, or the grand peals of choral adoration, which our ears will hear, will be uttered according to the grand ritual of the Church of Rome. This is the voice of the unhesitating praise that embraces and hallows the globe.”
What would Luther have replied to that? He would have said, “Truth must have a beginning. It is always, at first, in a minority. The gate of it is strait, the path to it narrow, and few find it. All reforms are, at the beginning, in the hands of a small number. If God and truth are on our side, what do we care for your multitudes?” We can make the same answer now.
Dr. Huntington proceeds to give his own creed in regard to the Trinity,—to state his own belief.