“When that judicious divine dropped this hint, he little thought that some philosophers of our day would be so desperately bent upon divesting Christ of His Divine glory, that they would be content to die like dogs, without leaving any surviving part of themselves, so that they might win the day against the Catholic Church, and the divinity of our Lord.
“I am sorry to observe that you have the dangerous honour to be at the head of these bold philosophers. Dr. Berkeley was so singular as to deny the existence of matter. According to his doctrine, there is nothing but spirit in the world, and matter exists only in our ideas. As a rival of his singularity, you run into the opposite extreme; you annihilate our souls; you turn us into mere machines; we are nothing but matter; and if you allow us any spirit, it is only such as can be distilled like spirits of wine. Thus, if we believe you both, being ground not only to atoms but to absolute nonentity between the two millstones of your preposterous and contrary mistakes, we have neither form nor substance, neither body nor soul!
“Glad am I, Sir, that when you made so free with the souls of men you did not pass your philosophical sponge over the existence of the Father of spirits, the great Soul which gives life and motion to the universe. But, though you spare the Father’s dignity, you attack the Son’s divinity; you deny the sanctifying influences of the Holy Ghost; and, by hasty strides, you carry us back to a dwarf, mongrel Christianity, made up of materialism, Judaism, and the baptism of John.
“To gain this inglorious end, in yours’ you collect the capital errors invented by fallen Christians in the corrupt ages of Christianity; then, taking some of the most precious Gospel truths, you blend them with these errors, and rendering them all equally odious, you turn them promiscuously out of the Church as the ‘Corruptions of Christianity.’ Thus you cleanse the temple of truth as our Lord would have cleansed that of Jerusalem, if he had thrown down the tables of show-bread as well as the tables of the money changers, and if He had turned out the cherubim of glory as He did the beasts which defiled that holy place. In short, you treat our Lord’s divinity as the Jews treated His humanity when they numbered Him with felons, that the mob might cry with a show of piety, ‘Away with Him! Crucify Him!’ with the thieves, His accursed companions!”
On the mysterious and holy doctrine of the Trinity in unity, Fletcher writes:—
“That there is a Supreme, Infinite, and Eternal Mind by which the world was made, is evident from the works of creation and providence. Every leaf of the trees which cover a thousand hills, every spire of the grass which clothes a thousand vales, echoes, ‘There is a God.’ But the peculiar mode of His existence is far above our reach. Of this we only know what He plainly reveals to us, and what we may infer from what He hath plainly revealed; for sooner shall the vilest insect find out the nature of man, than the brightest man shall of himself discover the nature of God.
“It is agreed on all hands that the Supreme Being, compared with all other beings, is One,—one Creator over numberless creatures, one Infinite Being over myriads of finite beings, one Eternal Intelligence over millions of temporary intelligences. The distance between the things made and Him that made them being boundless, the living God must stand for ever far higher above all that lives, than the sun stands superior to all the beams it emits, and to all the tapers lighted at its fire. In this sense, true Christians are all Unitarians: God having plainly revealed His unity by the prophets, by the Apostles, and by our Lord Himself, there is no doubt about this point. And may the hand which writes these sheets wither a thousand times over rather than it should designedly write one word against this glorious and ever-adorable unity!
“But although the Supreme Being is One when He is compared to all created beings, shall we quarrel with Him when He informs us that notwithstanding he has no second in the universe of creatures, yet, in Himself, He exists in a wonderful manner, insomuch that His own eternal and perfect essence subsists, without division or separation, under three adorable distinctions, which are called sometimes ‘the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost;’ and sometimes ‘the Father, the Word, and the Spirit’? ‘Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?’ or, Why dost Thou exist after such a manner?”
Fletcher then proceeds to describe the different opponents of his doctrine; namely,—
“Tritheists, who so unscripturally distinguish the Divine Persons as to divide and separate them into three deities; and who, by this means, run into polytheism, or the belief of many gods. Ditheists, generally called Arians, who worship two gods, a great god and a little god; the former uncreate, the latter created; the former God by nature, and the latter only by courtesy. Deists, who so unscripturally maintain the unity of the Divine essence as to admit but one Divine subsistence;” and who include Jews, Mahometans, Infidels, and Socinians.