No doubt there is much force in some of his arguments, and he completely demolished the theory of mutual consciousness. But he was much stronger as a destructive than as an architect. When he attempted to define a positive notion of the Trinity, he failed, as all did who went before him, as all have who followed after him. Nor could he escape the infection of a most infelicitous, if not a decidedly irreverent, habit of illustrating theological mysteries. Wallis had written of three somewhats, and of a Divine cube of infinite dimensions. Sherlock had propounded a theory of Divine mutual-consciousness; and now South came forward with the idea, that the distinctions in the Godhead are modes, habitudes, and affections of the Divine substance—they are postures—such in spiritual and immaterial beings, as posture is to the human body.[261] Passing over South’s coarse scurrility, I cannot conceive how any inquirer after truth can be helped on his way by this clever and brilliant companion, who never misses an opportunity of cracking a joke in his reader’s ear. Even when South’s reasoning is forcible, he is ever interrupting it with flashes of wit; and throughout one feels, what is fatal to all religious instruction, that the polemic is more anxious about victory than truth. No doubt his attack on Sherlock was deemed by contemporaries a decided success; he drove his antagonist from the field and spoiled him of his armour. But when he charged him with Tritheism, he charged him with what Sherlock utterly denied. That Sherlock’s theory is Tritheistic was a mere inference, and what may seem a logical deduction to others did not appear so to himself. In like manner Sabellianism, in the eyes of some, lurked under the folds of South’s argument, though he indignantly repelled the idea. The fact is, no man can attempt a logical explanation of the Godhead without being in danger of falling into Tritheism on the one side, or Sabellianism on the other. In such controversies we notice the frequent use of some word not in Scripture, but considered to be an equivalent for what is Scripture—a term conceived to be a concentration of diffused truth—the quintessence of a doctrine previously in a state of solution. Unfortunately such words are differently understood by different parties. One person refuses to take them in the sense affixed to them by another, and will employ a meaning of his own. The same proposition thus becomes to two different minds entirely different things, and the utmost confusion is the consequence. Theories to explain facts are confounded with the facts themselves, and a man who only denies a particular theory, is charged with denying the fact to which the theory relates. Hence, whilst Sherlock and South were really contending for the doctrine of the Trinity, each regarded the other as giving it up. It should be added that in the end, Sherlock’s statements were more cautious than at the beginning; for he came to admit that the phrases—three minds, three spirits, three substances—which he had so freely used, needed great care for their proper employment, and were liable to be taken in a heretical sense; that after all, Father, Son, and Spirit, are really of one and the same substance.[262] Sherlock and South did but follow up divergent tendencies of thought and action before the Council of Nicæa—tendencies which that Council sought to check and harmonize. Sherlock followed in the wake of Tertullian, Novatian, Hippolytus, and Origen, whose inquiries mainly pointed to distinctions in the Godhead. South trod in the footsteps of Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenæus, and Clement of Alexandria, who leaned towards Monarchianism, and were jealous of any dishonour done to the Divine Unity.
1693–8.
In this controversy, which divided two men by a distance, in the judgment of some thinkers, infinitesimally small, homage was nevertheless done to the essential importance of truth. The controversy, however, betrayed the utter absence of disposition on the part of each to learn one jot of wisdom from the other. It was literally a polemical affair; a battle, each seeing in his opposite an enemy—in fact the old story of disputes between Church and Church, sect and sect, conformist and nonconformist—war to the knife by mistaken foes, instead of mutual help by friends in council.
Of course Unitarians, as they stood by, watched the conflict with eager curiosity, striving to turn it to their own account. In the view of those who had advanced beyond John Biddle, the doctrine of the Trinity and the use of the Word were repugnant; and they traced what they deemed an innovation to the early philosophical schools that had so powerfully influenced the after-history of theological thought. They labelled Cudworth’s theory as the Platonic; Sherlock’s as the Cartesian; South’s as the Aristotelian. Moreover, they connected the scheme of Sherlock with the philosophy of Realism, and the scheme of South with that of Nominalism. With regard to speculations which had been woven around the teaching of Holy Scripture, there was some ground for the nomenclature; but it really forms another instance of the confusion of thought produced when critics identify metaphysical theories with simple conclusions drawn from Scripture, as expressed in the grand old words, “The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet there are not three Gods, but one God.”
THE TRINITY.
Howe took part in the bewildering dispute, and has been supposed by some to have advocated Sherlock’s side. But it seems to me that what I have been saying accords with his views, and that he counted such an opinion as that expressed by Sherlock only as a theory for obviating objection to a fact, whilst another theory might be held in perfect consistency with a sincere faith in the truth to which both theories apply. In his Calm and Sober Inquiry Concerning the Possibility of a Trinity in the Godhead, the utmost he asserts is, that such a mode of triune existence as Sherlock attributes to the Divine Being is possible, and to his mind the most reasonable; but he did not think another hypothesis of a different kind altogether indefensible. He adopted what is called the personal theory; but he did not deem a modal theory, like South’s, either absurd or heterodox.[263] Evidently he considered that different hypotheses are at hand not fully to elucidate the mode of the Divine existence, but to obviate objections, by showing that a threefold distinction in that existence can be imagined, so as not to involve any contradiction whatever.[264]
1693–8.
Amidst this war of words, in which reason and tradition had a share, secular authority interfered. On the 3rd of January, 1694, the Lords spiritual and temporal ordered their Majesties’ Attorney-General to prosecute the author and printer of an infamous and scandalous libel, entitled, A Brief but Clear Confutation of the Doctrine of the Trinity.[265] This was a State condemnation of Unitarianism, and the same year a tract printed by the Unitarian Society was seized by authority, and the writer apprehended. On the 25th of November, 1695, the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of Houses at Oxford decreed it to be false, impious, and heretical, contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and especially the Church of England, to say that there are three infinite, distinct minds and substances in the Trinity, or that the three Persons are three distinct, infinite minds or spirits. This was a condemnation by the University of the doctrines enunciated by Sherlock and supported by Bingham. The latter, in consequence of the storm raised by his sermon, resigned his fellowship, and withdrew from the University; but others, who thought with him, asserted, that what the Heads of Oxford had condemned as heretical, really expressed the Catholic faith; that the decree virtually accused of error the Nicene Creed and the Church of England, and exposed both to the scorn and triumph of the Socinians. Sherlock declared “that he would undertake, any day in the year, to procure a meeting of twice as many wise and learned men to censure their decree.”[266] Out of this state of things also arose the new Royal injunctions I have noticed. They prohibited every preacher from delivering any other doctrine concerning the Blessed Trinity than what is contained in the Holy Scriptures, and is agreeable to the three Creeds and the Thirty-nine Articles; and they also strictly charged the right reverend fathers to make use of their authority for repressing the publication of books against that doctrine.[267]
THE TRINITY.
Charles II. had in 1662 commanded the Clergy to avoid “the deep points of election and reprobation, together with the incomprehensible manner of the concurrence of God’s free grace and man’s free will.”[268] He thus claimed a high spiritual authority over the Ministers of religion, but it was by removing certain topics from within the range of discussion. In the instance just given, William III. enjoined the positive inculcation of a particular doctrine, and no other. He did not on his own authority define the doctrine, but only referred to the doctrine authorized in the Creeds and Articles recognized by the Established Church; indeed, he did not go beyond the terms employed in the sixteenth clause of the Toleration Act;[269] yet it must be confessed that altogether he appears as a still more definite theological censor than Charles II. And it is worth notice that in this respect he not only assumed a supreme Headship over the Established Church, but he also claimed to rule the Free Churches of England, for he commanded that no “preacher whatsoever, in his sermon or lecture, should presume to deliver any other doctrine concerning the Trinity than that defined in the Creeds and Articles.” When we weigh the words employed, we are astonished to find the constitutional King of the Revolution—the Prince who came to deliver the consciences of Englishmen from the despotism of James and the tyranny of Rome—binding upon the Ministers of religion one precise and rigid form of expression as to the most profound of all theological mysteries. What makes this fact still more curious, and the conduct in question still more unreasonable, is that the most learned men in the Church at that very crisis were unable to decide amongst themselves what was the doctrine of her formularies, Sherlock declaring it to be one thing and South another. The truth is, that William lent himself to a device of the well-meaning Archbishop for maintaining the orthodoxy of all religionists in the realm, without meaning to claim any power over the religion of his subjects; for to any usurpation of that sort he was, from temperament, education, and principle, utterly averse. The Whig Archbishop, whose intellectual acuteness did not equal his common sense, who could detect no political or philosophical heresy in the course which he recommended, simply sought to accomplish what he considered as a laudable end by a method which he thought most effectual. He sought to put down error, and to promote peace, and in doing it, hastily snatched at the rusty halberd of authority over conscience, which the Revolution had hung up as a relic of the past. Nothing could be more awkward and inconsistent than such a weapon, placed by a Latitudinarian Prelate in the hands of a Sovereign adored as the incarnation of civil and religious liberty.